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Uniform Resource Locator, an internet address that
describes the location of a specific site or document, usually on the
world wide web. A complete url describes both the protocol
used by the site in question (http, ftp, gopher and so on) and a
domain name (economist.com, for example). A machine name specifying the
actual part of the domain where the document resides, such as www, is
usually included (although this is not a necessity and many sites do without
it). So the complete url for the Economist's website is:
http:/www.economist.com
This example is easy for most web users to remember, but most are
more complex and would take forever to type even if they were memorable. For
the sake of greater simplicity, most urls are listed without the
protocol prefix and all web browsers now assume that unless specified
otherwise, they should use the http protocol to download pages from
the site to which a url refers. But other means have been devised to
make life easier still for web surfers. The simplest of these are further
enhancements to the software browsers, which can now remember all the
urls visited in the recent past and even type them in for you. More
ambitious was the realnames project, which attempted to assign a
memorable name to a web address rather than an incomprehensible string of
characters. But RealName faltered in the face of relentless indifference
from the web's users, who have developed a tolerance (and some say a
perverse liking) for the current system. Now resigned to the fact is that
the internet is simply too big to provide memorable address for all its
constituents, they adopt all sorts of ways to get to the url they
need, bookmarks, directories and search engines being the most
common. |
