John's Research Resources Page 3


A Lesson on URL Addresses Analyzing URL addresses.
NETSCAPE -- given the URL address HTTP://www.ksu.edu -- will open the "home web page" at Kansas State University. The HTTP identifies the URL as a web browser address; the rest of the code -- www.ksu.edu -- is the site address of the institution. (Incidentally, since NETSCAPE is a web browser, the program assumes that any site address which lacks the initials before the "://" is HTTP, so you do not have to enter the characters "HTTP://".) The first "domain" of the URL can be various things, but WWW is a common name for a web site. For this reason, you can sometimes guess a URL address for academic sites as beginning with WWW. The second part of the address is a code which sometimes identifies the institution, such as KSU for Kansas State University. The final "domain" of most URL addresses identifies the type of institution. In this example, edu identifies the site as an educational establishment. Other common domain identifiers are shown below:

Sometimes, a final domain identifier identifies the country in which the site's server is located. Generally, no country code is used for sites in the United States, but the initials ".us" can be added to the URL address with no effect on the web browser's abilitiy to find the site. (The home web page at Kansas State Univeristy, for example, can be entered as www.ksu.edu.us. Sites on servers outside the USA generally (but not always) have a two-letter country code which helps the servers find the site. For example, this URL address -- HTTP://coombs.anu.edu.au -- leads NETSCAPE to a server at the Australian National University, as the initials au indicated.

After the site URL address, there will often be a "slash" -- / -- and some other subdirectory names. Everything after the first "slash" identifies the "path" to the indicated file.

Occasionally, administrators at a site will move files around within the server, and the subdirectories on the path you have selected may not be there. It is helpful to know that you can sometimes delete the subdirectories and find your way to the "root directory" of the server, generally identified by a slash with nothing after it. For example, given this address --
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Edu/MSTE/internationalprojects.html
you may get a "404" error message from the Internet saying that the file you have requested does not exist. If that happens, you can remove some or all of the subdirectories from the path, and sometimes get onto the server at the site. From there, you can sometimes find the new location of the desired file.

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