Surprisingly, many people use a lot of acronyms when it comes to the Internet like the Website URL. Among the many out there, I can almost guarantee you’ve seen the word “Website URL”. And that might’ve left you wondering, “what is a website URL?”.
Your site end-users use URLs by typing them directly into the address bar of a browser. Or even by clicking a hyperlink found on a webpage (like the https://josephmuciraexclusives.com/) Or even, bookmark list, in an email, or from another application.
In this post, I’ll start with a basic answer to the question of “What is a website URL?”. Then, I’ll break down the 3 most important parts of a URL’s structure. As well as how each of those parts connects to your WordPress site.
What is a Website URL?
Short for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is the location of a specific website, page, or file on the Internet. Therefore, a Website URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. In that case, a Website URL is nothing more than the address of a given unique resource on the Web.
In theory, each valid URL points to a unique resource. Such resources can be an HTML page, a CSS document, an image, etc. While in practice, there are some exceptions, the most common being a URL pointing to a resource that no longer exists or that has moved. As the resource represented by the URL and the URL itself are handled by the Web server.
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Whereby, it is up to the owner of the webserver to carefully manage that resource and its associated URL. In other words, URL Components or as known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a specific type of URI (Universal Resource Identifier). It normally locates an existing resource on the Internet.
Meaning, a Website URL is when a web client makes a request to a server for a resource. More so, just like the Internet Society and IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) defines the concepts of the URI and the URL Components.
What is a Web Browser?
According to Mozilla Firefox, a Web Browser takes you anywhere on the internet. Letting you see text, images, and videos from anywhere in the world. All in all, the web is a vast and powerful tool.
Over the course of a few decades, the internet has changed the way we work, the way we play, and the way we interact with one another. Depending on how it’s used, it bridges nations. Driving commerce, nurturing relationships, as well as driving the innovation engine of the future. And is responsible for more memes than we know what to do with.
It’s important that everyone has access to the web, but it’s also vital that we all understand the web browser tools we use to access it. Of course, we use web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Apple Safari every day. But, do we even understand what they are and how they work?
In a short period of time, we’ve gone from being amazed by the ability to send an email to someone around the world, to a change in how we think of information. It’s not a question of how much you know anymore. But, simply a question of what browser can get you information fastest?
Which are the Components of a Website URL?
Briefly, a URI is any character string that identifies a resource. A URL is one of those URIs that identify a resource by its location, rather than by a name or other attribute of the resource. A URL for HTTP (or HTTPS) is normally made up of three or four components (more on that below).
A newer form of the resource identifier, the IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier), permits the use of characters and formats that are suitable for national languages other than English. In short, Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) are a new protocol element, a complement to URIs [RFC2396].
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An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO10646). There is a mapping from IRIs to URIs, which means that IRIs can be used instead of URIs where appropriate to identify resources.
For example, if you enter https://josephmuciraexclusives.com/url-components/ in your web browser, your web browser will take you to this post. But if you just enter https://josephmuciraexclusives.com/, you get taken to the jmexclusives home or main page, etc.
The main URL components are:
- A scheme. The scheme identifies the protocol to be used to access the resource on the Internet. It can be HTTP (without SSL) or HTTPS (with SSL).
- A host. The hostname identifies the host that holds the resource. For example,
www.example.com. A server provides services in the name of the host, but hosts and servers do not have a one-to-one mapping. Refer to Hostnames. Hostnames can also be followed by a port number. Refer to Port numbers. Well-known port numbers for service are normally omitted from the URL. Most servers use the well-known port numbers for HTTP and HTTPS, so most HTTP URLs omit the port number. - A path. The path identifies the specific resource in the host that the web client wants to access. For example,
/software/htp/cics/index.html. - A query string. If a query string is used, it follows the path component and provides a string of information that the resource can use for some purpose (for example, as parameters for a search or as data to be processed). The query string is usually a string of name and value pairs; for example,
term=bluebird. Name and value pairs are separated from each other by an ampersand (&); for example,term=bluebird&source=browser-search.
The scheme and host components of a URL are not defined as case-sensitive, but the path and query string are case-sensitive. Typically, the whole URL is specified in the lowercase. Likewise, the components of the URL are clearly combined and delimited.
Here is an example scenario:
scheme://host:port/path?query- The scheme is followed by a colon and two forward slashes.
- If a port number is specified, that number follows the hostname, separated by a colon.
- The pathname begins with a single forward slash.
- If a query string is specified, it is preceded by a question mark.
Here is an example of an HTTP URL:
A URL can be followed by a fragment identifier. The separator used between the URL and the fragment identifier is the # character.
A fragment identifier is used to point a web browser to a reference or function in the item that it has just retrieved. For example, if the URL identifies an HTML page, a fragment identifier can be used to indicate a subsection within the page, using the ID of the subsection.
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In this case, the web browser typically displays the page to the user so that the subsection is visible. The action taken by the web browser for a fragment identifier differs depending on the media type of the item and the defined meaning of the fragment identifier for that media type.
Other protocols, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Gopher, also use URLs. The URLs used by these protocols might have a different syntax to the one used for HTTP.
What is Web Scrapping?
Nowadays, people no longer worry about the lack of information, but they worry about paying for the screening of a large amount of useful information. So, how do you collect useful information? There are RSS, blogs, and other information sources, but they do not fully meet our needs.
Why? Simply, because a lot of information is not provided in the form of formatted data. To tackle this issue, engineers came up with a method to search for information exactly. Therefore, a large number of vertical search sites have appeared. We do not know in detail how it is implemented, but now we can precisely collect data.
One of the more popular uses of Python, web scraping is a powerful tool that you can use to play with data found on the Internet. Also known as web harvesting, programs make use of web scraping to read through HTML websites.
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In order to retrieve useful information for data processing purposes or simply for information sharing. And, eventually, in order to understand how web scraping is done, one must have a basic understanding of HTML fundamentals and syntax.
Being able to read and understand the format of which HTML web pages are presented is good enough. Check out this resource if front-end language seems foreign to you, or if you just need a bit of a refresher.
Finally, I am hoping that the above-revised guide on the main components of a Website URL was helpful. But, for more related online FAQs, feel free to Contact Us. Or rather, share your thoughts in the comments box below.
