What is a URL?
The uniform resource locator (URL) is a magic box that makes Internet surfing work. The "box" is the place on your browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, AOL) that has strings like the one here:

"http://www.thisis.com/anice/site.htm"

All that a URL does is to identify resources on the Web through a variety of naming schemes. This helps your browser to find the server where your Web page is physically stored. Now let us dissect the above URL. The structure of a URL is similar to that of a phone number:

Consider the number: 91-080-554-2342

(91) : India
(080) : The city of Bangalore
(554) : The area code
(2342) : Your destination, the actual number

Now let us look at the URL "http://www.thisis.com/anice/site.htm". This is nothing but a protocol that tells the browser that it should look for a Web page.

http: HyperText Transfer Protocol.

www.thisis.com: It is the domain name where "www" means the World Wide Web server, "thisis" indicates the name of the domain and ".com" says that it is a commercial site.

anice: it’s a folder, which the file path tells the browser to find on the Web server.

site.htm: it’s the final destination, your page.

How do URLs work?
Lets us look at in detail the path taken by the URL with the help of this URL.

http://www.shoptilldrop.com/fashion_2000/jewels.html

where http is the protocol, www.shoptilldrop.com is the domain name and fashion_2000/jewels.html is the file path.

Protocol
The hypertext transfer protocol (http) is the first element of the URL and it is a protocol. Always, the first element of a URL is a protocol. In addition to "http" the protocol portion of the URL could also read "gopher" and "ftp". But, the protocol for viewing text and images on your browser will always be "http". It will specify to the browser that it will be loading Web pages. The recent browsers assume that the user is surfing for Web pages and if he just types "www.abcd.com" the browser will automatically add "http://" to the URL.

Server domain name
In the above URL, "www.shoptilldrop.com" is called as the domain name and it is the second part of the URL. A domain name tells the browser where the Web page is physically located and it can either be very specific or general. In the above example, the domain name can be split into three parts such as "www", "shoptilldrop", "com". Let us see this from the reverse order. "com" tells you that the site is a commercial one. You might have come across other domain types such as "edu" (associated with educational institutions), "org" (non-profit organization), "gov" (a governmental site), "net" (a local network) and those representing a country such as "us" (United States of America), "uk" (England) or "ca" (Canada). The second part, "shoptilldrop", tells which commercial site the focus is on. The last part of the domain name "www" indicates the server and in this case it is a Web server.

File path
The file path tells the browser where to look for the Web page in question on the server. In the above URL the file path is "fashion_2000". So the browser will search for the folder named "fashion_2000" in the server. The file path need not have to be a single folder; it can also be a set of nested folders such as

"www.shop.com/fashion/jewels/rings/ruby84.html"

Phew! That’s a long one but simple to understand. First the browser looks for a folder called as "fashion". After finding it, the browser will look for the folder "jewels" within "fashion"; then it will look for "rings" inside "jewels".

File name
The file name is the name of the page you have typed the URL for. In this case, it is "jewels.html". Most of the Web pages end with a .html or .htm or .asp. If this page name is not typed some of the browsers use "default documents". For example if you enter "www.shoptilldrop.com/fashion" one of these three things could happen:

• You might get an error message telling that the requested page couldn’t be found.
• You could land in a default page. This happens when the Web server tells the browser to automatically look for the default page "index.htm" (it is a normal Web page) when it detects that the page name is not entered.
• You might receive a list of files that are currently under that folder.

The whole deal is that the protocol (http) tells the browser that it should look for and load a Web page. The domain name specifies to the browser that the Web page in question (shoptilldrop) is a commercial site. The file path tells the browser to find the folder named "fashion_2000". And finally the file name tells the browser which page it should look for to copy and display to the user in the folder "fashion_2000".

Trouble with URLs
One of the common errors messages that you come across while surfing is the 404 or page not found error.

The above error message means that the URL is invalid and that the file you have requested is no longer there or its name is changed. If this happens, you can tweak the URL a bit by editing the page name. For example if by entering the URL below

"http://www.filmi.com/hindi/aamir/qsqt.htm"

you got a "404 error" message, then you can remove the file name and retaining the rest of the URL, "http://www.filmi.com/hindi/aamir" which will leave a top-level page for that folder. From here, you can search and click a link that will take you to the desired pages.

Happy surfing!