HTML Uniform Resource Locators

HTML Links

When you click on a link in an HTML document like this:index page, an underlying <a> tag points to a place (an address) on the Web with an href attribute value like this: <a href="indexpage.html">Last Page</a>.

The Last Page link in the example is a link that is relative to the Web site that you are browsing, and your browser will construct a full Web address like http://www.shinetutorial.com/html/index.html to access the page.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

Something called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is used to address a document (or other data) on the World Wide Web. A full Web address like this: http://www.shinetutorial.com/html/index.html follows these syntax rules:

scheme://host.domain:port/path/filename

The domain is defining the Internet domain name like w3schools.com.

The host is defining the domain host. If omitted, the default host for http is www.

The :port is defining the port number at the host. The port number is normally omitted. The default port number for http is 80. 

The path is defining a path (a sub directory) at the server. If the path is omitted, the resource (the document) must be located at the root directory of the Web site.

The filename is defining the name of a document. The default filename might be default.asp, or index.html or something else depending on the settings of the Web server.

URL Schemes

Some examples of the most common schemes can be found below: