Web Addresses
In this lesson, we will see how to ype in an "Internet address" in our web browser and view the webpage found there. An Internet address is more properly known as a Uniform Resource Locator or U-R-L (sometimes called an "earl"). It's a standard way of locating resources on the World Wide Web.
You've probably seen URLs everywhere╖ on buses, police cars, at the end of your favorite television show╖ They're everywhere!! Think about one that you've seen. Got it? So what?!?! If you don't know what to do with a URL, it's useless!!
After this lesson, you will know how to read and use URLs to visit websites.
Let's say that a friend has given us a list of web sites in the local area. Since UCF is in Orlando, these are all Central Florida Internet addresses. The first one on the list is www.disney.com We enter a URL by clicking in the Location Window (the white strip beneath the toolbar). Since all the text becomes highlighted, we can simply type in the address from our list: www.disney.com. Nothing happened!! Always press Enter or Return after typing in the URL. Yes. We can see that this is the Disney website. We can press Stop to keep the page from loading further.
Let's take a look at the URL in order to understand how it's put together:
Notice first that there's this "HTTP://" that we didn't type in . This refers to the method by which web pages are viewed by our browser. Netscape and newer browsers understand that this needs to be there even when we don't type it. So don't worry about it!!
The WWW refers to the World Wide Web. Not all URLs start with WWW but many do.
Disney is the name of the company. "Dot com" means that this is a commercial website. Disney is a business.
We use the Back button to go back to where we started from.
Notice that in the address for UCF's website ends with "dot edu." This means that this is an educational institution.
Let's enter another of our Central Florida sites. We click in the location window and highlight the text. And we type in www.nasa.gov and press Enter or Return. Here is NASA's website. "Dot gov" is for governmental organizations.
Click the Back button, and let's type in our last URL. www.magicnet.net. This is an Orlando-area Internet Service Provider. The "dot net" indicates a computer network. MagicNet provides space for web pages and provides access to the Internet. (Internet Service Providers are addressed in the Remote Access tutorial on this CD.)
Clicking the Back button, we go back to UCF's page. The last three letters in the Internet address are called the "domain." Other domains are "dot mil" for military and "dot org" for non-profit organizations.
(By the way these three websites are merely examples. There are other amusement parks besides Disney, other government organizations besides NASA, and other Internet Service Providers besides MagicNet. Their display here implies no endorsement by UCF.)
We've seen in this lesson how to type a URL into a web browser that you already know or have in front of you. Later, we'll look at how to find a website when you don't have the address in front of you. But make sure now take a few minutes to practice what we've done here first!