URL as Location
A URL tells you "where" a Web page is located, just as a street address in the real world tells you where a house or business is located. Every page on the Web has its own, unique URL (which stands for Universal Resource Locator), so a URL is all you need to find any page.

Type a URL into your Web browser's Location or Address blank (depending on which browser you use) and hit the Return or Enter key on your keyboard, and your browser will find that page for you. (You CAN also get to a page without knowing its URL by clicking to it from a link on another page.) With a little experience, you can learn to read URLs just as easily as you read street addresses.

Reading URLs
Though there are some variations, there is a standard form for all URLs. This Internet standard is controlled by the DNS (Domain Name System). All URLs have several basic parts in common. Let's examine the URL for YHTI's homepage: http://www.yhti.net/index.html.

Part 1: http://
Like most Web addresses, this address begins with http://. This stands for HyperText Transport Protocol, the standard method of sending information on the Web. Anytime you see http://, you can be sure the address points to a Web page. (You may occasionally see addresses that begin with ftp://. These are FTP or File Transfer Protocol sites.)

Because almost every URL begins with http://, very often they are listed without the http://. Browsers now "assume" that what you type into the Address/Location blank is a URL and add the http:// automatically.

Part 2: Domain Names
The second part of the YHTI URL, www.yhti.net, is the name of the Web page's host machine. Most host addresses begin with www, which stands for World Wide Web. The second part, yhti, is the domain name, the actual name of the host. Most people refer to the site by its domain name. For instance, www.hotwired.com is usually just called "HotWired."

Businesses and organizations generally try to get a domain name that matches their name to make their URL easy to remember and their site easy to find.

Part 3: Top Level Domains or Suffixes
The final part of the hostname tells you what kind of host the page is on and where the server is located. In the case of YHTI's homepage, .net stands for "network." This indicates that www.yhti.net is owned by an Internet service provider, or network. Other common suffixes include:

• .com: commercial businesses (www.pepsi.com)
• .edu: educational institutions, like colleges and schools (www.ucla.edu)
• .gov: governmental agencies and bureaus (www.treas.gov)
• .mil: military agencies (www.defenselink.mil)
• .org: nonprofit organizations and personal pages (www.autism.org)

Country Suffixes
A domain's suffix can also tell you what country a host is in. Sites in the United States do not have any additional suffixes, but other countries have unique designations. Some of the most commonly seen are:

• .au: Australia
• .ca: Canada
• .ch: Switzerland
• .de: Germany
• .il: Israel
• .it: Italy
• .jp: Japan
• .uk: Great Britain

Folders and Files
The information following the .com's, .edu's, and .net's, tells the browser where the host stores the file. This part of the URL, which is separated from the domain by a slash (/) and may contain many characters separated by slashes, tells you the path the browser took to find the file on the server.

As this part of the URL gets longer, each section represents another folder or directory. The final section of a URL is the actual name of the file or folder - the actual name of the page you are on.

For example, this page's URL is http://www.yhti.net/support/using_urls.html shows that the Web page using_urls.html is located inside a folder called support. All of these folders are stored on a host named www.yhti.net.

.html or .htm
Most Web page names end in .html or .htm, which stands for HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the language used to create Web pages. If the URL does not end in .htm or .html, it likely points to a folder, or directory.

index.html
When you type a URL that ends in a slash, you are entering the URL for a folder or directory. A URL like this will locate the file in the folder or directory named index.html. An index file is often the site's homepage or the top page within a section of the site.

For example, if you want to go to the YHTI homepage, you can either enter http://www.yhti.net/ or http://www.yhti.net/index.html. Both URLs point to the same file, the index file. Most sites list their URL without the index.html for simplicity; if you are having trouble connecting to a site, try adding index.html or index.htm to the URL.

Navigating by URL
By paying attention to the URL, you can often orient yourself on a Web site. Sometimes big companies or organizations have many subsites that look like they could be the homepage. But if, when you look at the URL, you see a number of slashes, indicating directories and subdirectories, you know you are not on the top-level homepage. Sometimes it is interesting to begin highlighting and deleting the endings of a long URL to see how it takes you closer and closer to the homepage.