Full Form of URL

What is URL

The full form of the URL is Uniform Resource Locator. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a URI and established naming convention for Internet and intranet-accessible documents. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) enables a computer to locate and access a website hosted on a different computer on the Internet. A URL example is https://www.studytonight.com/.

A URL is often located in the address bar or omnibox at the top of the browser window. On desktop PCs and laptops, unless the browser is in fullscreen mode, the URL is always visible. In the majority of mobile and tablet browsers, the URL-containing address bar disappears as you scroll down, leaving only the domain visible. If the address bar is not visible, scroll the page upwards. When only the domain is displayed, touching the address bar displays the complete address.

Parts of a URL

The following information is contained in every URL:

• The protocol or scheme name.
• Port number comes after the colon.
• A host is called a domain or a literal IP address.
• The full path of the resource.
• A colon, two slashes.

You will find the URL of a web page on the top of the page in the address bar. This is what a typical URL looks like:

http://www.studytonight.com/full-form

The above URL contains:

• protocol: http
• host or domain: www.studytonight.com
• Path of the resource: /full-form

1). http:// or https://

HTTP refers to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It informs the browser the protocol it will use to access the specified domain's information. "HTTPS" is an abbreviation for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure" and indicates that data communicated over HTTP is encrypted and secure. The colon (:) and two forward slashes (//) follow HTTP or HTTPS to separate the protocol from the remainder of the URL.

2). www.

Next, "www" represents the World Wide Web and is used to differentiate the content. This element of the URL is optional and can be omitted numerous times. For example, entering "http://studytonight.com" will continue to lead to the study tonight website. The address section may also represent a subdomain, which is a significant subpage.

Note: You can also type the URL in the address bar of your browser. If the server is not valid, the browser may display a "Server not found" error and the browser may display a "404 error" if the path of the URL is incorrect. There should be no spaces in the URL and forward slashes are used to represent different directories. Thus, underscores and dashes are used to separate the words of a web address.

What is URI

The full form of URI is Uniform Resource Identifier which is a generic term that includes all the names and addresses that show objects on the World Wide Web. Generally, this is a sequence of characters that identifies a logical resource or the name and location of a file or resource in a uniform format.

There can be two types of URI:

• Uniform Resource Names (URNs)
• Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

Thus the resources can be accessed by other computers across a network or over the World Wide Web.

URI vs URL

HTTP vs HTTPS

Now let's find out the differences between HTTP and HTTPS: