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Maybe you've heard the name "earl" used with stuff related to the Web. It's really a URL (You Are Ell). It's pronounced as three separate letters.

It stands for Universal Resource Locater. In order for your web browser to fetch a page for you, it has to know the address (the URL or earl) of the page it's fetching.

There are different URLs for different resources. When we use a URL to specify an address, we say that the URL 'points' to that resource.

When you point your browser to GeoCities at the following address ... http://geocities.datacellar.net � you're pointing to web site

You don't actually see the name of the page in that URL, but it's there all the same. By the way, "geocities.com" is not a page name. It's a domain name. Page names end with the extension ".htm or .html or some other abbreviation following a dot.

URLs can point to all kinds of resources, and not just to web pages. As you use the Net, you'll see the following two formats:

1. scheme://hostname/description

2. scheme:description

Examples:

1. http://geocities.datacellar.net/buddychai/Navigator.html
2. mailto:sperare@hotmail.com

The "scheme" (which is short for "addressing scheme") simply tells us what type of resource we're looking at. Most of the pages you encounter on the web will use the scheme shown in example one above. The URL uses the 'http:' scheme, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, to transfer web data from a host computer to your desktop computer.

You'll also see the 'mailto:' scheme, such as this:
mailto:sperare@hotmail.com � and others as well. There are news, ftp, and file schemes. They're not quite as common, and not seen as much.

Here's the meaning of each:

http ... Webpage (hypertext)
mailto ... Mail address
news ... Usenet newsgroup
ftp ... File access via Anonymous FTP
file ... File on your computer

If you use your browser to view files on your computer, you'll see the 'file' scheme in action. You can do this now. Just type 'c:\' into your browser's address bar and you'll see a list of files on your computer. Magic!

And there you have it. If you've learned something new, this site has served its purpose. It's all calculated to make you a savvy user of today's technological marvel. Go get 'em!