There is nothing more conventional than the convention of unconventionality.
Words like "Internet," "Web" and "e-mail" have entered the vernacular. We exchange Internet addresses as we exchange phone numbers. However, unlike a phone number, possessing some form of an Internet address for a resource is not necessarily enough to allow one to connect.
In order to connect to a resource via your web browser, you must navigate to it (see Points 1, 2, and 3), or you must know its address. On the World Wide Web, the address of a resource is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). URLs always have three parts:
First, there is the protocol ("ftp", "gopher", "telnet", or "http").
Second, there is a divider ("://").
Third, there is the host and (often) the directory-path of the file.
Finally, there is usually the filename of the file being addressed.
For example, the URL of the file you are currently viewing:
It is also important to distinguish between "e-mail" addresses and URLs. E-mail addresses nearly always have the form user@host (where "user" is the username of the person, and "host" is the name or IP number of the computer where the person receives their e-mail). E-mail addresses are not accessible via the World Wide Web.
Once the URL is properly constructed (as described above), you must give that address to your web browser in order to access the resource. In the case of most graphical browsers (e.g., Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer), there is an "Open Location..." command under the "File" menu. Once this command is chosen, a window appears that allows you to enter the URL you wish to access. In the case of the text-based browser called "Lynx," type "g" and the prompt "URL to open:" appears on the bottom of the screen. Remember, there are never any spaces in URLs, and often, capitalization matters.
- Frank's Place
- My buddy Frank has his web home page at Indiana University. He tells me the URL is: "http/php.indiana.edu/~quinnjf/"
- This one should be simple, since Frank has given the URL. However, the URL is poorly-constructed. That is, the divider between the protocol "http" and the host "bronze.ucs.indiana.edu" must be "://". Thus, we could try to reconstruct the correct URL as "http://bronze.ucs.indiana.edu/~quinnjf/"
- FTP Recipe Archive
- There is an archive of recipes available via ftp at gatekeeper.dec.com in the /pub directory.
- Thus, the protocol is "ftp", the host is "gatekeeper.dec.com" and the directory-path is "/pub". So the URL is: ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub
- The trick with an FTP site is to remember that you may have to navigate within the site. In the case of this recipe archive, you must move down on a fairly long list to find the link to the "recipes" directory. In fact it is also possible to construct the URL more completely so that you will go directly to the "recipes" directory, i.e., ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/recipes
- Library of Congress Gopher
- The Library of Congress Gopher is at marvel.loc.gov
- The protocol is Gopher, the host is "marvel.loc.gov" so the URL is: gopher://marvel.loc.gov