What Does URL Stand For?

URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locater, this is the address you see at the top of your browser.

For every page on the Internet there is a unique address. Every time you visit a page on the Word Wide Web you will see they all have a different URL.
This can be broken down into parts that better show how a URL is structured. Look at our example below and we will go through it step by step.

What does URL stand for - HTTP protocol

Lets have a look at this first part of the URL, HTTP. This is the protocol being used, and in this case it is the protocol used for your browser to talk to servers.

Other protocols that are commonly used are HTTPS which is a secure version of HTTP, and also FTP which is File Transfer Protocol. This is mostly used for uploading pages to the Internet.

What does URL stand for - WWW the sub domain

The next part of the URL is the sub domain. In this example we are using one we see everyday WWW, which is a acronym for the World Wide Web. Another common sub domain is NEWS.

What does URL stand for - The domain name

The third part of the URL in our example is the Domain name, this is our address on the world wide web. If you were to build a web site you would have to purchase your own domain name that would give you a unique address for your site.

What does URL stand for - The file

Here is the the last part of our URL. This is called the file, or sometimes the article. This is identifying exactly what page you are looking at on our web site.

In our example it is an HTML document. This is the language used to display all the text and images you are looking at in this article.

A brief history of URL

URL along with HTML and HTTP were all invented in the early 1990s by a computer scientist working for CERN "The European Organization for Nuclear Research".

Tim Berners-lee invented this as a way to share information globally. Initially it was developed for the science community but has since been adopted as a standard of todays Internet. He is considered the father of the World Wide Web.

He is now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, an organization that sets the standards for the World Wide Web.

What Does URL mean? Uniform Resource Locater

Happy hunting to you on the world wide web! I hope our URL definition made things a little clearer and when this guy asks what the URL of a website is you will be able to speak his language!

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• What does URL stand for
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