What is an URL?

URL - Uniform (or universal) Resource Locator. 


The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the web address of a World Wide Web page.It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994.It provides the address for locating the information on the Internet.Every web page will have unique URL.

A URL will always starts with a protocol prefix like "http://", ftp://, gopher://, telnet://, and irc:// etc.It uses forward slashes (/) and dots to separate its parts.A URL uses numbers and wont have spaces in between.

ex,

http://in.yahoo.com/.


The language used in URL is English.



For Example,


URL               : http://www.Yahoo.com

Domain name  : Yahoo.com
Domain : Yahoo
Subdomain     : www
Top level domain : com

The domain name is made up of the domain + top level domains(or domain suffix).
To know in detail about domain name and top level domains visit my previous post.

Here, http:// stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol.It enables the browser to know what protocol it is going to use to access the information specified in the domain.
 URL- Uniform Resource Locator
 Uniform Resource Locator 


In other words,the domain name is the overall web site identifier and the URL is the locator for a particular resource on the Internet.

In short,The first part of the URL is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use, and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located. The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.