8b. URL's: Pointers to the Internet

It's getting time to link to the Big Wide Web using the web's addressing scheme.

Note: For this lesson, you will not need your HTML text file. This is another low-effort lesson!

WHAT IS A URL?

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is what the WEB uses to find the location of files and documents from computers on the Internet. Your web browser screen, the URL for this document is typically displayed in the upper part of the Web browser window in the address bar. The URL includes:

• An identifier for the type of Internet server;
• An Internet address; and
• A file path to the particular item of interest.

The URL is what you will need to build a link from the web page that you are creating to connect to another document of information available on the Internet.

HOW ARE URL'S STRUCTURED?

The structure of a URL is:

   type://in.ter.net.address/directory/sub-directory/.../filename

The "type" indicates the type of Internet server being accessed:

http

a web server, "HTTP" stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

gopher

an Internet Gopher site or menu driven directories of files and information

ftp

an anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site, archives of files

telnet

Initiates a Telnet session to log on remotely to another computer When selected, your web browser will launch a Telnet external program and connect to the specified site.

WAIS

Wide Area Indexed Server -- a site to search a collection of subject oriented documents by keywords

file

A file on your local computer system (hard drive, floppy, local file server)

The type is always followed by "://" and the Internet address of a remote computer.

If the URL is to the main level of this host (its "home page"), then the URL is terminated with a slash "/". If you are linking to a sub-directory or a file with in a sub-directory, you must also use the exact path to that item using the slash character to indicate the entire file path. For Example:

http://www.domainname.com/sub-directory/sub-directory/filename

Note: For most web servers spelling does count! So does capitalization! File names on UNIX computers are case sensitive, meaning that a file named

    FancyPants.htm

    Is a different file from

    fancypants.htm

EXPERIMENTING WITH URL'S

Note that URL's can link to any site, directory, subdirectory, text file, image, digital movie, or sound file on any Internet site that is set up for the general public to access. The best way to see different URL's is just to hover your mouse over any hypertext link on any web page any where on the web -- if you look at the bottom of your web browser, in the status bar, it should display the URL that you would be re-directed to if you was to click on that link. You could go to a major site on the web such as Yahoo and "peek" at URL's (can you see the URL for Yahoo when you placed your mouse over the link in this sentence?)

Here is a quick and easy way to copy a URL for a link in any page that you visit. You first must access the "secret" pop-up menu from any hypertext link in a web page -- click and hold the mouse if you're on a Macintosh; click the right mouse button for Windows and Unix. From this menu, select Copy This Link Location, Copy Shortcut (or similar menu item). After releasing the mouse button, go into any text document and select Paste from the Edit menu. Heyyyyy!! You've just nabbed the URL from a link in the web page (doing this, you can copy a URL without even having to visit the page it's linking to!)

CHECK YOUR WORK
Practice
Find some sites on the Internet that you like (There's plenty out there). For each one, record its name and its URL displayed near the top of your browser window in the address bar. See if you can copy and paste the URL's into a text document. You will use these URL's later to add links from your own web pages to the sites that you found.

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