If you want to look at any Internet resource, be it an FTP site, a Gopher menu, a Web page, or even send an email message, you must either know the URL of the resource or, as in the case of the World Wide Web, have an imbedded link to the resource. In either case, the URL points to a specific place on the Internet. Being able to read a URL can be a valuable skill to have when using the Net. The URL can give you a general idea of where the resource is, where it originates, and who is responsible for creating it. The address also hints to the type of resource and whether or not it will be of value to you.
Parts Is Parts Internet addresses consist of three separate parts and are read from left to right.
Because most people access the Internet through the Web, we ll use a Web address in our examples. Later, we ll take look at URLs for email addresses. Protocols The Internet uses rules, conventions, and procedures known as Protocols in order for all the interconnected computers to communicate with each other. The Internet may consist of millions of computers using any number of operating systems with data in hundreds of different languages, but the protocols used over the network to move data from the source to your computer are the same. If they weren t, there would simply be no Internet.