The Internet: What is a URL

When you ask the browser to fetch a page from a server, you type in a string, and address: the URL.

The URL is composed by the first part that determines the protocol.

http:// or https:// signal we want to use HTTP or HTTPS (secure HTTP).

Then we have the server address, which can be a domain name or an IP.

google.com or 142.251.209.14.

Combined, the protocol and address look like this:https://google.com

Then there’s the path of the document on the server. Anything appended to the address part represents the document path.

For example, I have a page on my website flaviocopes.com, its URL is: https://flaviocopes.com/debugging/

  • https is the protocol.
  • flaviocopes.com is the domain name that points to the server
  • /debugging/ is the document URL relative to the server root path.

The web server is responsible for interpreting the request and, once analyzed, serving the correct response back to the client.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: ▶︎ What is a URL
2: What is a port
3: The DNS protocol
4: The TCP protocol
5: The UDP protocol
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