Addresses for web sites are called URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). Most of them begin with the protocol used to access web pages, http (HyperText Transfer Protocol), followed by a colon and two slashes. Many web addresses include www, but this is not always the case. For example, the URL for FIRN’s web site is https://www.firn.edu and the URL for the Florida Center for Instructional Technology is https://fcit.usf.edu/ . The different parts of a URL are divided by a period.
Each part of a URL contains certain information. The first field is the host name, identifying a single computer or organization. The last field is the top-level domain, describing the type of organization and occasionally country of origin associated with the address. Below are some common Top Level Domains (TLD’s):
| .com | Commercial |
| .edu | Educational |
| .gov | US Government |
| .mil | US Military |
| .net | Networking Providers |
| .org | Non-profit Organization |
Current domain name country codes include, but are not limited to:
| .au | Australia |
| .de | Germany |
| .fr | France |
| .nl | Netherlands |
| .uk | United Kingdom |
| .us | United States |
Some URL addresses include a directory path and a file name. Consequently, the addresses can become quite long. For example, the URL of a web page may be: https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/default.htm .
In this example, “default.htm” is the name of the file which is in a directory named “holocaust” on the FCIT server at the University of South Florida. A convention used when creating websites is that the first page created for the site is named index.html or default.html. Web browsers are configured to access this file if a specific file name is not included in the URL used to access a site.
