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Each of these resources has an address which you will see
displayed in the location box of your browser if it's what is
displayed in your browser at the moment. Most of us are used to
seeing the url for web pages as we surf in the location box.
This url has more parts to it than just the address to the
resource. Lets' look at a URL and break it into it's parts.
http://www.rayslinks.com/index.html
At the front of the url are the letters http. These tell the
browser which protocol to use to access the resource. More on that
in a bit.
Next comes the domain name of the server the resource is located
on. In this case it's www.rayslinks.com. Domain names are
used to give the surfers something freindly to look at and remember
easier than the numbers which are actually used to locate the
resource.
When you request a web page the domain name is passed to a
domain name server which looks up the actual numbers and tells your
browser where to look for the page. If you've ever seen the error
message "No DNS entry" this means that the domain name is no longer
registered, or the domain name server is down temporarily.
The last part of the url in this case it the file name itself,
index.html.
Most browsers recognize several protocols which are used to
access specific types of resources or resources on specific types of
servers. The most often used one is http which is the hypertext
transfer protocol. Others are ftp [file transfer protocol], file
[which is used to access files on your local machine], gopher [very
old protocol], and news [for accessing news servers]
A url may also contain information after the file name which is
used to pass parameters to the server or a cgi program on the
server. These additional bits of information may be passwords or
search terms or a customer number. There are many uses for
paramaters, but you will most often see them when using a search
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