Technology Tip Number 7
Anatomy of a Web Address

You’ve seen them everywhere, even on some state license plates.  But what does all those http’s and .com’s mean.  Here’s the website that I referenced for the following information:  
http://www.googleguide.com/web_address.html

Below is a simplified explanation of what makes up a web address:  

First of all, the official computer name for a web address is URLwhich stands for:  Universal Resource Locator. 

Here’s a sample URL: 

 http://www.crsd.org/buildings/nj/index.html

http:// stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and that basically tells the computer that we are looking to “Transfer” “Hyper Text” (a webpage) from the internet to your computer.  When typing a web address into Internet Explorer you usually don’t even have to type the “http://” because the computer assumes it.

www stands for World Wide Web which is the body of software rules and protocols that make up what we know of as the internet.  Just about every webpage you’ll ever view is a part of the world wide web.

crsd in this example stands for Council Rock School District and it is technically the “second level domain name” 

org is a an example of a “top level domain name”  “.org” is primarily used by Non-profits, “.edu” is commonly used by schools and universities, “.gov” is used by the government, and the now famous “.com” is primarily for commercial websites.  Together crsd.org could be described as the school district’s “domain name” 

buildings/nj/ if you remember the old old days of DOS (before we had mice and folders on the screen) you might remember switching folder levels using the “/”.  If you don’t remember its OK, but you should know that “/buildings/nj/” tells the computer to go to a folder labeled “nj” that is inside a folder labeled “buildings”. 

index.html this is the actual file name of this webpage.  More specifically, “index” is the name of the file and “.html” is the file extension which tells the computer what kind of file it is.  “.html” stands for Hyper Text Markup Language which is the language most web pages are written in.

Now you know what the different parts of a web address are. 

PRACTICE ACTIVITY:  How to use this information.  Well, if a someone shows you a website that they’d like to reference for a project you can quickly evaluate the resource by looking at the “domain name” at the beginning of the web address.   For example, just by looking at the web addresses, can you determine which of these websites would be the most reliable resource for information about the Vikings?

http://www.jerryswackyfunsite.com/something/junk/vikings.html

http://www. uofindiana.edu/anthropology/vikingresearch6.html

TO KEEP ON LEARNING:  If you'd like to learn more about web addresses try searching the internet for:

URL
Uniform Resource Locator
What is a domain name
Parts of a web address

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