The End Of My Search!

Okay after reading maybe over 6 different websites on URL's and IP Addresses i think i now, personally, understand what they are.. so now I'm going to teach you what an URL and an IP address is.

Definition!

URL: Uniform Resource Locator

IP: Internet Protocol

URL!

People use URL addresses everyday to find the specific website they want.Websites like http://www.blogger.com/ have become more familiar to us than street names. Thou do computers really use them? These URL addresses that we memorise are actually in no use to the computers, as for us its easier to remember a simple URL instead of a pattern of numbers.... and this brings us to IP ADDRESSES. When humans need to remember things it can take us some time and use of our mnemonic aid but... computers need no such thing. So instead computers use a serious of numbers called IP addresses to help them find a specific website.

There are many different types of IP addresses but the one mainly used by computers is a Dotted-Decimal Form. A dotted decimal form has 4 different numeric parts ,with each one separated by a period. An example of this would be Bloggers IP address which is 209.85.129.191.

The Structure of URLs

URLs can be broken up into separate segments and it can be confusing so I'll explain each part.

Protocol: The protocol determines how the information is determined and processed.A colon and two forward slashes always follow the designation of the protocol.The colon is an important part of the protocol name and assigns a device or process. The two slashes help distinguish what we are seeking from a local file.

User:Password@: The “user:password@“ section is rarely encountered by the average user but allows you to enter your user name and password for sites where that is required.

Host:Port: Ports aren't relevant for human use so explaining them could become quite difficult and tiring so an easy example is that HTTP is assigned port number 80. The “host” is the computer where the information that we want resides.

URL-Path: This is the path on the host computer to the particular page or file that we wish to download. This part will often have the name of a directory, then some sub-directories and then perhaps an html file.

Domains

For some time, these domains were limited to com, edu, org, net, mil, gov, and int. The com, net, and org domains are available to persons and businesses worldwide. Originally, they were supposed to be descriptive with com, net, and org meaning “commercial”, “network”, and “non-profit organization”, respectively. However, these meanings have become blurred. Anyone can apply for a domain containing org. The edu (education) domain is for properly registered four-year institutions of higher learning, i.e. colleges and universities.

And that's it for my description of URLs and IP Addresses, it was a long and tiring search but i learnt something so it was worth it, and hopefully you'll learn something too.