What is url

Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. News and Special Offers occasional. Full Bio. View our Editorial Policy. A URL contains the following information: The protocol used to access the resource. The location of the server whether by IP address or domain name.

The port number on the server optional. A fragment identifier optional. All URLs are presented in the following order: Scheme name. The resource name is the complete address to the resource. The format of the resource name depends entirely on the protocol used, but for many protocols, including HTTP, the resource name contains one or more of the following components:. For many protocols, the host name and the filename are required, while the port number and reference are optional.

SomewhereInTheDocument is an anchor to another part of the resource itself. An anchor represents a sort of "bookmark" inside the resource, giving the browser the directions to show the content located at that "bookmarked" spot.

On an HTML document, for example, the browser will scroll to the point where the anchor is defined; on a video or audio document, the browser will try to go to the time the anchor represents. Any URL can be typed right inside the browser's address bar to get to the resource behind it.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg! Using FTP, for example, is not secure and is no longer supported by modern browsers. Let's examine what that distinction means in more detail.

In your browser's address bar, a URL doesn't have any context, so you must provide a full or absolute URL, like the ones we saw above. You don't need to include the protocol the browser uses HTTP by default or the port which is only required when the targeted Web server is using some unusual port , but all the other parts of the URL are necessary.

Because the browser already has the document's own URL, it can use this information to fill in the missing parts of any URL available inside that document. In this case, the browser will call that URL with the same protocol as the one used to load the document hosting that URL. The browser will use the same protocol and the same domain name as the one used to load the document hosting that URL. Note: it isn't possible to omit the domain name without omitting the protocol as well.

On desktop computers and laptop , unless your browser is being displayed in fullscreen the URL is always visible. In most smartphone and tablet browsers, the address bar containing the URL will disappear as you scroll down and only show the domain when visible. When the address bar is not visible, scroll up the page.

If only the domain is shown, tapping on the address bar shows the full address. Most video sharing pages, such as YouTube , also have sharing links below the video or in the video. Using these sharing links is another method you can get the URL of the video. You can open a URL by clicking a hyperlink. For example, if you click "hyperlink" in this paragraph, it opens a page describing hyperlinks. If a URL is in printed material, e.

If the URL is in an e-mail, it can also be copied and pasted into the address bar. Some printed material may also have a QR code that can be scanned with your smartphone to open a web page. Most people realize that a space is not allowed in a URL. However, it is also important to realize, as documented in RFC , the URL string can only contain alphanumeric characters and the!

Any other characters that are needed in the URL must be encoded. When a URL points to a script that performs additional functions, additional information parameters is added to the end of the URL. For example, a search engine URL pointing to a search results page includes a parameter with the search query words.

Below is an example URL that points to the Computer Hope search page, with the search query parameter of "example search".