Browser Help

What's a URL?

URL stands for Universal Resource Locator. It is an addressing scheme that browsers use to request web pages from web servers. We'll use http://www.mcg.edu/healthcare/MyWebPage.htm as an example.

http://
hyper text transfer protocol. This tells your browser a web page is coming up rather than an FTP (file transfer protocol) site (ftp://).

www.
Subdomain. Most world wide web servers use "www" but some use others.

mcg.
Unique domain. This is the name an organization gives its Internet site. Domain names must be registered with InterNIC.

edu/
High-level domain. This identifies the type of organization or country. Examples are "edu" for education, "gov" for government, "com" for commercial, and "us" for the United States.

healthcare/
The directory where the web page is stored. Can be many levels deep.

MyWebPage.htm (or .html)
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) file that your browser uses to display the web page.

Note:
Some URL's are cap sensitive. Some are not. Be sure to enter the address exactly as it appears. And be sure to give others URL's written correctly.