Abbreviation of
Uniform Resource
Locator, the global
address of
documents and other
resources on the
World Wide Web.
The first part of the address 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.
For example, the two URLs below point to two different files at the
domain pcwebopedia.com. The first specifies an executable file
that should be fetched using the FTP protocol; the
second specifies a Web page that should be
fetched using the HTTP protocol:
See "Countries
and Their Domain Extensions" in the
Quick Reference
section of Webopedia.
See also "How
Web Servers Work" in the "Did
You Know...?" section of Webopedia.