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Cartography for Swiss Higher Education

Internet Techniques and Web Formats >> World Wide Web >> URL

1.3.3. URL

You all know very well the World Wide Web. Already by reading this lesson you are using a Web Browser and the Internet.

When starting your Web Browser you do it always with the intention to get some information of the WWW such as e.g. looking up the timetable of your train, looking up the price of the newest computer, etc. Your first act is always entering the URL of your wanted Web Page in the address bar of your browser.

It may look like this:
http://www.ika.ethz.ch:80/teaching/mmkarto

Have you ever asked what role play all these components? We provide you some answers:

URL

URL
remark

The Domain Name can be replaced by the IP address of the server: the URL would then look like this:
http://129.132.127.159:80/teaching/mmkarto

Most Web Browsers do not require the user to enter "http://" to address a Web page, as HTTP is by far the most common protocol used in Web Browsers. Likewise, since 80 is the default port for http it is not usually specified. One usually just enters a partial URL such as www.karto.ethz.ch. (WIKIPEDIA)


Query Strings

In addition to the path where the wanted file is stored, URLs can be extended by query strings. To understand what is meant by this we want you to do a little exercise:

Without having started the Google homepage and without having entered the two terms "Cartouche" and "E-Learning" in the search bar we get the corresponding matches. Why this?
We entered the query for these terms already in the URL by using the query string "?q=cartouche&q=e-learning". The query starts with a question mark "?" and is followed of one or a series of parameter=value pairs (in our case this is "q=cartouche" and "q=e-learning"). The series of pairs is seperated by the ampersand "&". The presented query can therefore be extended by an arbitrary number of pairs.

remark

Try to create other queries by changing the values of the parameter q and adding other parameter=value pairs. Look at the result you get in your browser.

Additional exercise

(Mouseclick to see solution)

Enter some searching terms in the search bar of an arbitrary search machine. After having pressed the "Start-Search-Button" have a look at the URL that will be created automatically. You don't have to understand the meaning of every single parameter but normally the meanings can be guessed.



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