The full form of URL is “Uniform Resource Locator“. A URL is the address of a resource, which can be a specific webpage or a file on the Internet. When a URL is used with http, it is known as a web address. URL is a specific character string used to access data from the World Wide Web (WWW). Each valid URL points to a unique resource. Such resources can be an HTML page, a CSS document, an image, etc. It was created in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee. It is a type of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).
Each URL contains the following information:
- Protocols (http or https).
- A semicolon (:), two slashes(//).
- A host, usually called a domain name.
- A colon followed by a port number..
- Absolute path to the resource.
A URL can be entered by typing it into the address bar of your web browser. If the URL does not contain a valid server, a browser may display a ” Server not found” error and if the path in the URL is incorrect, the browser may display a “404 error”. A URL does not contain spaces and uses forward slashes to represent different directories. So, dashes and underscores are used to separate web address words.
- Also Read: URI Full Form
Example of URL
Example 1: https://fullform.blog/internet/www-full-form/
- The protocol is
https. Facebook uses HTTPS (the secure version of HTTP) because you have to be logged-in to use it, and because they store and use a lot of your personal data and information. - The TLD is
.com, indicating that Facebook is probably a commercial site (it is). - The domain name is
fullform.blog. - They are using the
wwwsubdomain. Probably for usability reasons (some people still expect all domains names to begin withwww, even though it isn’t necessary). - The path is
internet/www-full-form, which identifies a specific resource on their server.
Example 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology
- The protocol is
https. - The TLD is
.org, indicating that the domain is probably run by a non-profit organization. (That is not always true, but in this case it is.) - The domain name is
wikipedia.org. - The subdomain is
en. Wikipedia uses language-code subdomains. This URL is for an English-language article. - The path is
/wiki/Internet. This identifies the specific resource (the wiki article on the Internet) on Wikipedia’s server. - This URL has a named anchor,
#Terminology. This indicates that the URL is not just for a specific document, but for a specific place within that document. IF you followed this link, the page would be scrolled down to the “Terminology” section, rather than the top of the page.