OmniWeb Help

URLs and Links

About URLs

Just as a street address and a map can help you find a building, there's a common convention for the kind of addresses used to locate web sites on the Internet. These addresses are known as Universal Resource Locators, or URLs. For example, our URL is http://www.omnigroup.com/. A closer look at it:

• http stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. A protocol is the "language" spoken between your computer and a server on the Internet; HTTP is the protocol most often used for retrieving web pages. OmniWeb also supports other protocols, including HTTPS and FTP.
• After the protocol prefix comes the internet address (or host name) of a server. www.omnigroup.com is the name of our web server. It ends in dot-com because The Omni Group is a commercial entity. The omnigroup part is what identifies it as part of our domain, and the www part identfies which of our computers the URL points to (the World Wide Web server).
• The part of a URL following the host name tells the web server what content you're interested in. In this example, a trailing / (which doesn't even need to be there) specifies the main page of our web site. Something else, such as /products/omniweb/, would specify a certain page of our web site.

Links and URL icons

If you've gotten this far, you've probably discovered that colored, underlined text is often a clickable link that will send OmniWeb to another web page. They aren't always colored and/or underlined, as page authors can change their look to match the aesthetics of the page. Links can also be images. But no matter what a link looks like, you can still tell it's clickable -- when the mouse cursor is over a link, it changes to a pointing hand.

In OmniWeb, URLs are also often represented as icons. What the icon looks like will tell you something about the URL.

	This is the default icon for a URL.
	OmniWeb displays this icon to indicate that the web page associated with it may have been dynamically generated by the server -- meaning that if you go back to the same URL, you might not get the same page.
	A lock icon superimposed on a URL icon indicates that the URL is for a secure website (that is, one that uses the encrypted HTTPS protocol to ensure that the data you exchange with it is kept safe from prying eyes). This icon only appears in the title bar of browser windows.
	URL icons are normally purple (or graphite, if you've chosen that as your Appearance color in Mac OS X System Preferences). But if you use OmniWeb's bookmark change checking feature, they might gain badging. A green checkmark badge indicates that there have been changes to a bookmarked web page since you last visited it. A yellow caution badge indicates that the page was not reachable the last time OmniWeb tried to contact the site. If it stays yellow through a number of checks over a period of days it may be that the page on the server is no longer available.
	Folders that you create in your bookmarks have folder icons. A folder can have a URL associated with it (in addition to having bookmarks and other folders placed inside it), causing it to have a URL icon superimposed on the folder icon.

OmniWeb allows you to do a number of things with URLs via drag and drop. Wherever you see a URL -- be it a icon, a clickable link, or selected text, in OmniWeb or another application, you can drag it to do something with it:

• Drag a URL into an OmniWeb window to follow it in that window, into an empty area the tab drawer to create a new tab, or onto an existing tab to replace the currently loaded page.
• Drag a URL to your bookmarks window or hold the URL over the bookmarks toolbar icon to save it for future reference.
• Drag a URL to the Dock or Finder to create an icon that can be clicked later to follow the URL.
• Drag a URL to any place you can type text to insert a textual representation of the URL.
• Hold down option before starting to drag a URL or link and OmniWeb will create a new window with that location which follows your mouse as you drag.
• Double-click a URL icon to have the address opened in a new window.
• Drag a link or an image outside of the browser window and then back in to have it opened in that window.
• You can drag links from background OmniWeb windows without bringing that window to the foreground.