Ever get a leftovers note when you came home late one night? It might have said something like:

Went to bed. Theres chicken in the fridge and pie in the freezer.

Thats what a URL is like.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is really a fancy way of saying it tells you where something is located on the Internet. Most of us only encounter URLs that tell us where a website or webpage is. For example:

The URL http://www.somedomain.com tells us where the somedomain.com website is located

The URL http://www.somedomain.com/product1.html tells us where the webpage is for product #1 on the somedomain.com website

But if you went to either of the URLs above (theyre fictitious by the way) youd encounter dozens, if not hundreds, of other URLs along the way, probably without even knowing it. How?

Well, every image that appears on any webpage is stored on a computer somewhere thats connected to the Internet (this computer is called a server). And when a webpages URL is typed into a browser, the browser doesnt just receive the webpage file, it also receives all the individual image files that appear within that webpage. And each of those images has to be found in order to be sent along with the webpage file. And guess how each of those images are found C thats right, their own URL.

So while http://www.somedomain.com/product1.html could be the URL for a specific webpage, that webpage could include a URL like http://www.somedomain/images/logo.gif which would mean theres a logo image file named logo.gif and it can be found in the images folder on the same server that the product1.html webpage file is located at.

And then thered be a URL for the Special Sale image on the same page, and another URL for the Product 1 image, and so on and so on. And thered also be URLs for Flash content, or audio, or video, or whatever else ends up on that webpage.

And just like theres only one leftovers note that points out the location of multiple things (chicken here, pie over there), so too a webpages URL can ultimately point out the location of multiple things using multiple URLs.

And thats why a URL is like a leftovers note.

Copyright (c) Grant Pasay 2005. All rights reserved.