Many people have heard about the concept of a URL, but few know why it is needed and what it is.

Therefore, it would be useful to analyze several questions related to the topic “URL address” - what is it, where is it used, what is the structure and other interesting points.

In fact, if you have visited the Internet at least once in your life, then you have used a URL address. Everything is much simpler than it might seem at first glance.

General information

A URL is the address of a resource on the Internet.

The concept of “resource” in the previous sentence refers to a website, image, document or anything else that can be located on the Internet on some remote server.

There is also chrome which works in a similar way. Still, most often we, ordinary users, use the most common http.

Developers use ftp and similar specialized protocols.

Now let's move directly to the example. Let's take one of the articles on this site and a link to it - (by the way, a very good article).

So, as we see, everything here corresponds to the structure described above.

Parameter<способ>here http, followed by the standard “://” construction..

Everything related to the host - login and password - is not visible to the average user. And after “/” comes the direct address of the desired article, this is already a parameter<путь>.

There are no additional parameters here.

This is what any URL in the world looks like.

How to find the URL

Interestingly, many people do not know where to get this very URL address. Of course, if we are talking about a website, then you can view it in the address bar.

For example, let's take the same article described above.

Figure 2 shows the location of her address in the browser.

It is worth noting that the browser usually does not specify the parameter<способ>from the above structure.

As you can see, in Figure No. 2 there is no “http” inscription near the beginning of the address. This is quite normal. Typically, this parameter becomes visible after copying this address to the buffer.

By the way, copying here occurs in a completely standard way - by pressing the key combination Ctrl + C.

The second method is to select the corresponding text, right-click on it and select “Copy” from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 3.

But, as we said above, not only entire sites have a URL, but also individual files, such as images and documents.

To find out their URL, you can also right-click on the corresponding file, for example, a picture, and select “Copy image address” from the menu, as shown in Figure 4.

If we are talking about a document, you can also always right-click on it, then see a drop-down menu and select “Copy link address” in it, as shown in Figure No. 5.

Attention: The above pictures show the dropdown menu in the Opera browser. Depending on the browser appearance of this menu may change. But the names of the items we need almost always remain unchanged.

Actually, this is the way to find out the address of a particular resource.

As you can see, at the end there is a file extension – .jpg. After the parameter<хост>here after the “/” there is a multi-level address for accessing the photo.

This address means that the picture with the name “kak-v-vk-zakrepit-zapis-na-stene-%E2%84%9611-650×406.jpg” is located on the site host in a folder called “wp-content”, inside which there is a folder “uploads”, inside it is “2016”, and in it there is also a folder “03”.

In principle, everything in this address is extremely clear. The only question that raises questions is this construction: “%E2%84%9611”. This is an encrypted fragment of the address.

So, we have already figured out where to get this website or other resource address. But sometimes when copying, for example, something like this: “https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone” something like this is copied:

• “https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D1%84%D0%BE%D0%BD” - this is the most common encryption.

Without delving into the depths of the knowledge of this world, let's say that all URLs are written only using a specific set of characters.

And the Cyrillic alphabet, as we understand, is not included in it. Therefore, in order for the machine to understand where it should go, encryption occurs.

This is done in two stages:

1. Encoding in Unicode, the output is a sequence of two bytes.
2. Hexadecimal encoding.

In more modern browsers, Base58 encoding occurs first.

Each byte is separated by a percent sign, i.e. "%". Actually, this is what determines what we can see above.

Modern browsers no longer allow the user to see links with hexadecimal digits.

Therefore, if you copy the link in normal form, and get something like “https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D1 %84%D0%BE%D0%BD", just update your browser!

Story

The history of creating URLs is quite interesting.

And we will touch on this area in order to better understand what these structures are and why they were created.

Although, from the above it is already possible to understand that a URL is the address of a resource on the Internet, and it was created so that this resource could simply be found there.

But it’s interesting that they first started talking about URLs in Geneva. Tim Berners-Lee is considered its inventor.

This event happened in 1990 - much later than it might seem at first glance.

At first, URLs were used to designate the location of individual files on the Internet, but then experts realized that it was very convenient and began to use it to designate almost all possible Internet resources.

Gradually, the URL was replaced by the so-called URI. According to the networking textbook, this construct is also a symbolic definition of a resource.

The URL includes, firstly, the name of the site, and secondly, its location.

There is also a URN - this is either just the address of the site/resource, or its name. URI combines URL and URN.

This design was invented in the same 1990 as its progenitor, URL.

Although the completion of work on it dates back to 1994. Released in 1998 new version URI.

In 2002, it was reported that the term URL had become obsolete and that it was better to use just the URI instead.

Thus, the most used ways of denoting the location of files on the Internet originate in Geneva, and specifically in the European Council for Nuclear Research, or simply CERN.

The latter is better known to those who at least sometimes watch the news.

Prospects

A modern URL has huge amount disadvantages, among them:

• Low flexibility;
• Encryption problems;
• Indicating the path to non-existent resources;
• Imposing a hierarchical structure on resources (the creator of the URL himself spoke about this);
• Poor handling of hypertext structure.

For these and other reasons, a completely new interpretation of URLs called PURL was proposed.

This standard will use a slightly different approach.

Everything will be based on the existence of the PURL database, in which all names and paths to resources will be stored.

The system will regularly check these resources and, if necessary, remove or update links to them. This will solve three of the five problems listed above.

As for the rest, experts are still at the stage of developing their solutions.

Below you can see a very interesting and entertaining video about the Internet in general.

Viewing it will allow you to understand even more what a URL is and what place this structure occupies in the work of the World Wide Web.

History of the Internet

Website page URL: What is it and where can I get it?

In English it stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which translated into Russian means “unified resource locator”. In Russian, this abbreviation is usually pronounced as “u-er-el”, “yu-ar-el”, or simply “url”. Let's try to understand in more detail what a URL is. Every document (web page) on the Internet has a specific location that can be pinpointed to. Using a URL, the exact path to a specific web page is indicated. Just as you specify the path to any file on your computer, the URL is built according to a specific pattern, which usually looks something like this:

http://name.ru/papka/document.html

Where http - indicates the type of protocol through which data is transferred, name.ru - means the domain name of the site, papka is a folder, and document.html is a specific page to which this URL leads.

Since our URL http://name.ru/papka/document.html is fictitious, is given only as an example, and, accordingly, does not lead to any web page, then if we try to click on it, we will be taken to a page containing information about the error. It may look different, but we will definitely see the inscription “404 not found”. “Not found” in translation means “not found,” and the appearance of a 404 page means that the URL address of the web page was entered incompletely, incorrectly (with an error or typo), or the requested page is no longer located at this address because it was deleted or renamed

A 404 error often occurs when you click on a link found on another page and the link is out of date. The site author could have moved the document we needed, renamed it, or deleted it. What to do if a 404 page appears during the transition? First, check that the URL is correct if we know it. Correct any errors or typos and try again. If error 404 occurs when following a link to an unfamiliar resource, you should try going to the main page and using the site search - it is possible that necessary information still there will be.

By the way, many website developers make sure that the 404 page on their site does not look frighteningly hopeless. Humorous text with a funny picture is placed here to cheer up the lost user, as well as links to the main site, search bar or site map. If the 404 page looks unfriendly and there are no links to follow on it, you can try to manually shorten the URL, leaving only the site name - in our example it will be http://name.ru/ and thus try to get to the main page of the site, from where you can will go to the page you are looking for.

Almost every user working on the Internet comes across references to URL, URLs, invitations to go to a link and use the link. For those who are unfamiliar or new to these concepts, I decided to write a material in which I will tell you what a URL is, how to use a URL, what parts a URL is divided into, and I will also explain how to find the right link on the Internet.

URL- this is an address indicating the path to the Internet resource where the various types files (documents, pictures, videos, audio, etc.). The abbreviation URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator”, in Russian it is usually pronounced as “url”, “yu-ar-el”, “u-er-el”, often simply the word “link” is used.

I remember searching some time ago for what a URL address is, in order to competently tell my brother all the subtleties of the concept. And I myself became interested when this term appeared.

The author of the concept of URL is the Briton Tim Bernes-Lee, and the invention itself (1990) marked a qualitative leap in the development of Internet technologies. Now the URL is an identifier of the addresses of almost all resources on the network, while the term URL itself is gradually being replaced by the more extensive term URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

Social media post URLs

What parts is a URL divided into?

A classic example of a URL looks something like this:

http://site_address/folder/page.html

As you can see, the URL is divided into several parts:

First part (http://) defines the protocol to be used. Simply put, it talks about the method that will be used to gain access to the desired resource.

The “HTTP” protocol used in this URL stands for “HyperText Transfer Protocol”, and it is used in the vast majority of cases. But you can find URLs using other protocols, for example, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure - a secure, encrypted version of HTTP), mailto (address email) and others.

In total, there are several dozen types of URL protocols: ftp, http, rtmp, rtsp, https, gopher, mailto, news, nntp, smb, prospero, telnet, wais, xmpp, file, data, etc., but usually several basic ones are used, listed by me a little higher.

Second part(site_address) is the domain name. Technically, it's just a line of symbols, letters, or a combination of words that allows people to easily remember the address of their favorite page. Otherwise, links to resources would look like http://192.168.384..

Third part (folder/page.html) usually points to some resource page that the user wants to access. It can be simply in the form of a name, or in the form of a path to a specific file through a set of folders, the latter usually separated by a slash (/). The extension of Internet pages can be different - php, htm, html, shtml, asp and a number of others.

These explanations can be seen visually in the video:

Abbreviations used before the domain name www(World Wide Web) is not mandatory, you can use the site address without it, the site will definitely open.

Features of using a URL address

If the URL specified by the user is not correct, then the system will show us a 404 error with the note “Page not found!” This means that the user typed either the wrong or outdated page address, therefore, accuracy, accuracy and attention are required when typing the address. When typing a URL, I would recommend using , copying the page address using the “copy/paste” functions. You can also try typing a shortened URL in the form of only the main name of the site (without folders and pages), and on the main page of the site look for a link to the page we need.

Disadvantages of URLs

After describing that this is a URL link, let's look at all the disadvantages of a URL. Along with the advantages of making it easy to navigate the Internet, URLs have their own disadvantages. This works only with numbers, Latin letters and some symbols, the Cyrillic alphabet usually must be recoded (URL Encoding) in two stages, in the first of which each Cyrillic character is converted into two bytes, and then each of the bytes is rewritten using the hexadecimal system.

In addition, it is recommended to use predominantly small letters in the address (some Unix systems will perceive their uppercase versions as different characters, which can lead to an error opening the page), and it is also prohibited to use spaces in URL addresses.

How to find a URL address. Bookmarks.

To find the required URL, you can use search engines, in which you need to enter the keywords of your search. For example, if you need a movie, then enter its name, or the names of the actors, if music - the names of the performers and the name of the composition. By clicking “Search” you will get many sites with URL addresses, by clicking on which you can find the desired result.

URL of the page you are on at the moment, located in your browser's address bar at the top.

To remember the URL of the page you need, use your browser's bookmarks bar. For example, in the popular browser Mozilla Firefox, the bookmarks icon in the form of an asterisk is located at the top right at the address bar level. By clicking on it, you will be able to enter a name for your bookmark, as well as a folder where to put the bookmarks (I usually use a special bookmarks panel that allows you to access any of them with one click).

Conclusion

The use of URLs has made browsing the Internet much easier, allowing many users to easily and quickly access the sites they need. If you still have questions after reading the article “What is a URL address?” write them in the comments to the article.

All that is needed today is to enter the name of the site and its extension in the address bar, after which the user gets almost instant access to the resource. And all this without the need to remember a rather complex series of three-digit numbers, everything is done easily, quickly, efficiently - in general, what is needed, isn’t it.

URL redirecting, also known as URL forwarding, is a method of presenting a page, form, or entire web application with more than one URL. HTTP provides a special type of response, HTTP redirect , to perform this operation, used for many purposes: temporary redirection while the site is being maintained, permanent redirection to keep external links working after changing the site architecture, progress pages while a file is loading, and so on.

Operating principle

In HTTP, a redirect is caused when the server sends a special response to a request: redirects. HTTP redirects are responses with a 3xx status code. When the browser receives a redirect response, it uses the new URL provided and downloads it immediately: in most cases, the redirect is invisible to the user, except for a small performance impact.

There are several types of redirects and they are divided into three categories: permanent, temporary and special redirects.

Constant redirects

These redirects are designed to last forever. They imply that the original URL should no longer be used and a new one should be used instead. Search engine bots trigger an update to the associated URL for a resource in their indexes.

The specification did not intend to allow method modification, but in practice, client applications do so. Code 308 was created to eliminate ambiguity in behavior when using non-GET methods.

Temporary redirects

Sometimes, access to a requested resource cannot be provided from a particular location, but can be provided from another. In this case, temporary redirects can be used. Search robots do not remember the new, temporary link. Temporary redirects are also used when resources that represent temporary pages are created, updated, or deleted.

The specification did not intend to allow method modification, but in practice, client applications do so. Code 307 was created to eliminate ambiguity in behavior when using non-GET methods.

Special redirects

In addition to regular redirects, there are 2 special ones. A redirect with code (Not Modified) redirects the page to a local cached copy (which has been outdated), and a redirect with code (Multiple Choice) is a manual redirect: the body, rendered by the browser as a web page, lists possible redirects and the user selects one of them .

Alternative ways to specify redirects

HTTP redirects are not the only way to redirect. There are two more methods: HTML redirects use the element , and JavaScript redirects use the DOM.

HTML redirects

HTTP redirects are the preferred way to create redirects, but sometimes web developers do not have control over the server or the ability to configure it. For such special cases, developers can create an HTML page with an element and set the http-equiv attribute to refresh in the block the element provides general information (metadata) about the document, which includes the title and links to scripts and styles."> . When the page is rendered, the browser will find this element and navigate to the specified page.

ServerName example.com Redirect / http://www.example.com

The URL http://example.com/ will be redirected to http://www.example.com/ (but not to http://example.com/other.html)

Redirect_Match does the same thing, but uses a regular expression to determine the set of URLs that will be affected by the effect:

RedirectMatch ^/images/(.*)$ http://images.example.com/$1

All documents in the images/ folder will be redirected to another domain.

If you do not want to set a temporary redirect, an additional parameter (use either the HTTP status code or the permanent keyword) can be used to set another redirect:

Redirect permanent / http://www.example.com Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com

The mod_rewrite module can also be used to create redirects. They are more flexible, but more difficult to use.

Nginx

In Nginx, you create a special server block for the content you want to redirect:

Server ( listen 80; server_name example.com; return 301 $scheme://www.example.com$request_uri; )

To apply redirects to a folder or a subset of pages, use the rewrite directive:

Rewrite ^/images/(.*)$ http://images.example.com/$1 redirect; rewrite ^/images/(.*)$ http://images.example.com/$1 permanent;

IIS

In IIS, you use the element to configure redirects.

Redirect cycles

Redirect loops happen when a successful redirect is followed by another that has already been completed. In other words, there is a loop that will never end and eventually no page will be found.

In most cases, this is a server problem, and if the server cannot detect it, it will send an Internal Server Error status code. If you encounter such an error shortly after editing the server settings, then this is most likely a redirect loop.

In the case where the server cannot detect it: the cycle of redirects can spread to several servers, each of which does not have a complete picture of what is happening. In this case, browsers will show an error message. Firefox will output:

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

then like Chrome:

This Webpage has a redirect loop

In both cases, there is nothing the user can do (as opposed to a client-side error such as a cookie or cache mismatch).

It is important to avoid redirect loops as they completely disrupt the user experience.

URL(URL, from the English Uniform Resource Locator) - an index of site placement on the Internet. The URL contains the domain name and the path to the page, including the file name of that page.

Tim Berners-Lee (a member of the European Nuclear Warfare Council in Geneva) invented the URL in 1990, which at that time was simply an address for storing files in the system.

Along with great advantages (availability of Internet navigation), the page URL also has a disadvantage - it only works with Latin letters, numbers and some symbols. If you need to use, for example, Cyrillic, then the URL must be recoded in a special way..ru/wiki/%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE-%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE %D0%B5-url/. Such encoding takes place in two steps: first, each character is converted into a sequence of two bytes, then each byte is rewritten in hexadecimal.

How much does a website's URL mean in SEO?

Search engines take into account occurrences of key phrases in URLs. The greatest influence is exerted by occurrences in the address of the domain and subdomains, less, but still very significant value, play occurrences of the path to the page and the file name of the page. In this connection, a type of earnings called cybersquatting is actively developing on the Internet. Its essence is to register domain names at market value for the purpose of subsequent resale at an inflated price.