1.
[syn: URL, uniform resource locator, universal resource locator]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
uniform resource locator
n 1: the address of a web page on the world wide web [syn:
URL, uniform resource locator, universal resource
locator]
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
Uniform Resource Locator
Uniform Resource Locater
Universal Resource Locator
URL
web address
(URL, previously "Universal") A standard
way of specifying the location of an object, typically a web
page, on the Internet. Other types of object are described
below. URLs are the form of address used on the World-Wide
Web. They are used in HTML documents to specify the target
of a hypertext link which is often another HTML document
(possibly stored on another computer).
Here are some example URLs:
http://w3.org/default.html
http://acme.co.uk:8080/images/map.gif
http://foldoc.org/?Uniform+Resource+Locator
http://w3.org/default.html#Introduction
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip
ftp://spy:secret@ftp.acme.com/pub/topsecret/weapon.tgz
mailto:fred@doc.ic.ac.uk
news:alt.hypertext
telnet://dra.com
The part before the first colon specifies the access scheme or
protocol. Commonly implemented schemes include: ftp,
http (web), gopher or WAIS. The "file"
scheme should only be used to refer to a file on the same
host. Other less commonly used schemes include news,
telnet or mailto (e-mail).
The part after the colon is interpreted according to the
access scheme. In general, two slashes after the colon
introduce a hostname (host:port is also valid, or for FTP
user:passwd@host or user@host). The port number is usually
omitted and defaults to the standard port for the scheme,
e.g. port 80 for HTTP.
For an HTTP or FTP URL the next part is a pathname which is
usually related to the pathname of a file on the server. The
file can contain any type of data but only certain types are
interpreted directly by most browsers. These include HTML
and images in gif or jpeg format. The file's type is
given by a MIME type in the HTTP headers returned by the
server, e.g. "text/html", "image/gif", and is usually also
indicated by its filename extension. A file whose type is
not recognised directly by the browser may be passed to an
external "viewer" application, e.g. a sound player.
The last (optional) part of the URL may be a query string
preceded by "?" or a "fragment identifier" preceded by "#".
The later indicates a particular position within the specified
document.
Only alphanumerics, reserved characters (:/?#"<>%+) used for
their reserved purposes and "$", "-", "_", ".", "&", "+" are
safe and may be transmitted unencoded. Other characters are
encoded as a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. Space
may also be encoded as "+". Standard SGML "&;"
character entity encodings (e.g. "é") are also accepted
when URLs are embedded in HTML. The terminating semicolon may
be omitted if & is followed by a non-letter character.
The authoritative W3C URL specification
(http://w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Addressing.html).
(2000-02-17)