What's Your Web Phone Number? The URL.

Where am I? Where do I go?
The answer on the World Wide Web is always a
URL - Uniform Resource Locator.
They're like phone numbers or addresses.

First comes the "protocol" which for Web pages is always: HTTP - HyperText Transmission Protocol. There are other kinds too, like FTP which lets you copy files from other people's computers, or FILE which lets you read files that are stored on your own computer.

http:

Next comes the "domain" which is a fancy word for the name of the computer that the Web page is stored on. They usually have periods in their names.

//www.w3.org/

Last comes the name of the file, after any subdirectories that may be needed to show what folders the file is in on its computer. If there's no file-name, then you'll get whatever file is set up to appear by "default".

hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

You'll often see an ".html" at the end of the file-name. That stands for HyperText Markup Language, which is the kind of simple text document that Web pages are written in.

Now put it all together. Type:

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

on the browser's URL line. (Return to this page after you make the jump.)

If you got to the right place, it should have looked like this.


copyright 1995 Philip Merrill
this page may be freely reproduced
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