UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATOR

URL redirects here. For other uses of URL, see URL (disambiguation).

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a Uniform Resource Identifier which, “in addition to identifying a resource, [provides] a means of locating the resource by describing its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network ‘location’).”^[1]

URL schemes

Among URI schemes, the following are a sample of those which people have historically classified as URL schemes.

• http
• https
• ftp
• mailto
• ldap
• file
• news
• gopher
• telnet
• data
• irc

Popular usage of “URL”

People often call an Internet domain name a “URL”. People sometimes call the concatenation of an Internet domain name and a URI path a “URL”. Neither construct is a URI and so neither construct is a URL. However, there is a widely-deployed body of software that accepts these constructs in place of URIs, translating the constructs to URIs using context, heuristics, or both. For example, widespread Web browsers accept the text “www.example.com” as user input in an address field, inferring the scheme and yielding “http://www.example.com”.

Pronunciation of “URL”

Some people pronounce “URL” as an initialism (“U-R-L”). Other people pronounce “URL” as an acronym (“Earl”). Preference may vary between populations.

See also

• Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI)
• History of the Internet
• Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI)
• Percent-encoding
• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)
• URL normalization
• Website

References

1. ^ Tim Berners-Lee, Roy T. Fielding, Larry Masinter. (January 2005). “Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax”. Internet Society. RFC 3986; STD 66.