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Understanding the Components and Structure

of a URL
An easy to understand basic tutorial about components of URL (aka Internet address).
Learn to identify various parts of a URL and their functions.

Often, during our initial days of learning about the Internet in schools, we are required to
understand and write about components of a web URL. To help you in getting the basic
concept and parts of a URL, I am writing this article. The abbreviation URL stands for
Uniform Resource Locator (lay people also call it “address” or “web address”). The URL
address and the email address make two of the most important forms of identifications in
the web directory. URLs are associated with webpages and other web resources. And email
IDs are associated with people. Before we get into details, let’s begin with some interesting
facts about URL:

In 1995, Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, defined and implemented a
scheme of addressing each resource on the WWW or Internet. Such a scheme was
extremely important because WWW contained millions of items (like images, web
pages, files etc.) and each needed to be uniquely identified for Internet to work
smoothly. Barnes-Lee called these addresses as Uniform Resource Identifier
(URI) — a name that was later changed to URL.
Today there are over 70 billion web pages and each one of these has a unique
address (i.e. URL). That’s the power and importance of URL scheme!
A URL never contains any space.
Mostly a URL is in lowercase — although the letter case does not really matter in URL
 or email address.
Most of the URLs begin with http://

Structure of a URL
Now let’s analyze the various parts of a URL. Let’s take the URL of a YouTube video for the
purpose of our study. This URL points to the viral “Why this Kolaveri Di” song on YouTube.
The URL is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR12Z8f1Dh8&feature=relmfu

For the ease of our study, I am coloring various parts of this URL — so that you can
recognize each part easily.

Basic Components of a URL

Protocol
Every URL starts with the name of the language (geeks call it protocol) using which your
computer and the server of this song should communicate. In our case study, the language
is Hypertext Transfer Protocol or http. Also there are other purpose-specific protocols
available — so at places you might also see ftp and https …

The protocol is followed by the :// characters.

Note: Some people mistakenly believe that in the page names like about:blank — about is
a protocol. That’s not true. About is just a naming convention for internal pages used by
many popular browsers.

World Wide Web

After protocol comes the famous www — in some URLs you will not find it but we will not go
into those details. www simply means that the resource you are seeking by the means of
this URL resides in the www subdomain of your domain name (more explanation is given
below).

URL Components and Structure

Domain name / Resource Owner

Then the name of the resource owner (i.e. domain name) comes; which is youtube in this
case.

Domain extension
Owner’s name is followed by the type of category in which the owner domain is registered.
.com means that the website which is making this resource available to you is of the
commercial nature. There are a lot of other types of categories as well. For example, .org
for organizational website, .edu for educational institutions, .gov for government websites,
.mil for military websites, .in says that the website has a connection with India. There are
scores of such domains extensions.

Sub-domains
Here, I would like to introduce the concept of subdomain as well. A reader of this article
suggested that subdomain should also be explained in the article. Well, a subdomain is just
like a subdirectory. It is part of the domain and is identified by a unique and separate URL.
For example, if we want to have two subdirectories inside a domain example.com then we
can create them like:

science.example.com (in directory notation it is equivalent of com/example/science)

and

history.example.com (in directory notation it is equivalent of com/example/history)

Here you should note that in directory notation, subdirectories are written after the parent
directory. In contrast, in the URL notation, subdomains are written before the parent domain.
Another difference is the separator. Directories are shown separated by a slash (in UNIX) or
by a backslash (in Windows). In URLs, subdomains are separated by period (aka dot)

Resource Name
Then comes the name of the resource that you are seeking from the website. In our case
study, watch is the webpage that you are seeking.

If we see it in totality, “watch” is a webpage that is residing on a website called youtube in a

domain .com on the Internet.

Question Mark
A question mark “?” signals the end of the entire domain name and beginning of the
parameter list. Some webpages expect certain parameters to be passed on to them. This is
necessary for the page to function properly.

Parameters
The parameters are passed in a “key=value” format and parameters in the list are
separated from each other by a character “&” (pronounced as “ampersand”). In our
example, we are passing two parameters to the watch page. These parameters are:

v=YR12Z8f1Dh8&feature=relmfu

[Note that that there is not even a single space in the entire URL. Space is not allowed as
part of a URL or email address]

The first parameter is v whose value is YR12Z8f1Dh8 and the second parameter is feature
whose value is relmfu. Both the parameters are separated by the & character.

This completes the URL. Although there are finer details associated with the structure of the
URL — but I will stop here because I want this tutorial to be simple and bare minimum for
the people who are not very tech-savvy.

If you have any question or suggestions, please feel free to comment. I welcome feedback
from my readers. If you think anything else could be added to this article, please let me
know. Thank you for using TechWelkin.
Related Articles for More Information:

No related posts.

Last updated: 31 July 2017 | Published on: 27 February 2012 | Authored and Edited
by: Lalit Kumar and Team | Filed as: Miscellaneous » Understanding the Components
and Structure of a URL

Lalit Kumar is the Principal Author and Founder of

TechWelkin. He is a web explorer and he enjoys
finding useful information on the Internet. He loves to
put things together to create a bigger solution. Lalit
is passionate about technology, languages and
literature. You can contact Lalit via email (techwelkin
[at] gmail [dot] com) or Facebook
(facebook.com/techwelkin).

Comments

CLIFTONIO says

How can someone explain the general structure of URL?

Reply

johnatahan says

What exactly do the URL parameters do?

Reply

Lalit Kumar says

URL parameters provide information to the web page to act upon.

Reply

Aruna says

Why do we go for parameter passing in url , when we can directly redirect by giving the
url ?

Reply

Raja says

Good Article to learn basics of the url, Thank U Mr. Lalit..

Reply
nikkikc says

what does &utm=logged_1 mean at end of url

Reply

Lalit Kumar says

UTM are variables used for tracking a URL.

Reply

mADZHIGA TAVHANA says

Wow that is lovely. I am in process of creating my website now and I would love you to
keep me updated. Keep well Mr Lalit.

Reply

Michelle says

What is the name behind the slash in the URL (www.mydomain.com/house) what is the
house in reference to?

Reply

Lalit Kumar says

It could represent be a directory or a file. If it represents a directory then that

directory will most probably have a file named index.

Reply

asdi says

thanks a lot kumar. we here at wishmove were struggling a bit to channel and redirect
urls. As our site is static, it rely heavily on url manipulation. This clarifies a lot.

Reply

Paul Omondi Oliech- says

Hi, Kumar, does the domains and subdomains the same as host name, folder and files
respectively?

Reply

Lalit Kumar says

 No. The concepts of subdomain and a folder are a bit different.

Reply

Sai says

Hi Lalit,

Nice writeup. Can you share more on the part which you skipped; what is difference
between http://www.example.com and abc.example.com

Thanks,
Sai

Reply

Lalit Kumar says

Hi Sai, thank you for the comment and suggestion. I have included information
on the concept of subdomains.

Reply

Tim Berners-Lee says

What’s my last name again? You may want to look it up on Wikipedia.

Reply

Lalit Kumar says

Thanks for pointing to the typo mistake. It has been corrected.

Reply

chrispoole says

sorry i mean thanks

Reply

chrispoole says

thanks for hacking into my account

Reply

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