URL

Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.

The first part of the address is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use, and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located. The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.

For example, the two URLs below point to two different files at the domain pcwebopedia.com. The first specifies an executable file that should be fetched using the FTP protocol; the second specifies a Web page that should be fetched using the HTTP protocol:

ftp://www.pcwebopedia.com/stuff.exe
http://www.pcwebopedia.com/index.html