TECH: What URLs are

["Karen G. Schneider" <kschneid@UMICH.EDU>]

Several people have asked me what URL means.  It stands for Uniform
Resource Locator; it's the address of a resource on the Internet.  URLs are
created from the type of tool, the computer where the tool is located, and
any subdirectories or files to further specify the location.  The format
for most URLs is:

tool://name.of.computer/subdirectory/subdirectory...[etc.]/filename

Here are some famous URLs:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/  [the WWW machine at the White House]

gopher://nysernet.org/  [the NYSERNET gopher]

ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/  [a software archive, good for Macs]

http://www.sils.umich.edu/~kschneid/fun/darcy.html    [My cat's home page;
I have a subdirectory on the UM SILS computer, and I've created another
subdirectory called "fun," and I wrote a little file called "darcy.html" to
talk about my cat. Not really famous :-)   ]

Hope this helps.

Karen <kschneid@umich.edu>