Understanding URLs and Linking :

n today’s lesson I’ll be going to tell you about URLs, what is a URL and what are its type, what are the various parts that a URL is composed of. I am sure this will be a new and exciting lesson for you all. Lets start.

URL is Uniform Resource Locator that tells where a particular resource is located. The word uni means one and form means type. Lets take an example to understand the 5 parts of a URL.

http://makeuseofundaz.blogspot.com/2009/08/environmental-engineering-laboratory.html

The link mentioned above is a URL and is made up for five parts.

1. http:// : Full form of http is Hypertext Transfer Protocol which tells the browser that the information is located somewhere on the WWW ( World Wide Web)

2. www : World Wide Web tells the browser to search the particular address on Internet. If we want to search a particular resource of our local computer we will use file:/// as a protocol. I’ll explain each and every protocol later in this tutorial.

3. makeuseofundaz.blogspot.com : This is known as hostname that includes the web pages, files and folders.

4. 2009/08 : These are the folders that are hosted on the server. 2009 is the main folder that includes another folder called 08.

5. how-to-share-files-on-twitter.html : This is the file name that is in the 08 folder. This pattern is same as the files stored in our computer.

Till now you are familiar with the anatomy of URLs. Lets move further and understand types of URLs. There are two types of URLs

• Absolute
• Relative

Absolute URLs are those that include all the necessary information. like the link discussed above.

Relative URLs are those that only includes file name and folder. For example;

series/htmltutorials/gagan.html

The link above does not include any hostname but contains only file name and folder name, any URL following the above pattern can be termed as relative URL.

Linking one document to another

We use anchor tag to link one document to another. We also use the hyper-reference tag (href) with anchor tag to link the files.

Syntax

http://you-file-link"> Link text 

Output

 Link text 

Email Links

To use hyperlink as an email link, we use the mailto tag, which when clicked open the default emailing program.

Syntax

abc@xyz.com"> Click here  to send us email

Output

 Click here  to send us email

Chart telling about different types of protocols

Protocol Syntax	Use of the protocol
http://	It tells the browser that the information is located somewhere on the WWW ( World Wide Web)
file:///	It tells the browser that the information is located somewhere in our local computer
ftp://	FTP ( File Transfer Protocol) It is used for documents on an FTP server
gopher://	It is used for documents on a Gopher server
telnet://	It is used to open a Telnet connection
wais://	This protocol is used to connect to a Wide Area Information Server
mailto://	Used to open default email program
news:	It is used to connect to a newsgroup

I know you might be confused with these protocols, do not worry I’ll be giving all the detailed information in my e-book.