What is a web address?

A Web address, or URL, is an Internet address that denotes the location of a specific webpage, file or document on the World Wide Web. URL is a short for the term "uniform resource locator." Every page or file located on the Web is assigned a unique Web address.

Web addresses are necessary so that Internet users can access specific resources on the Internet. A Web address is entered into the address bar of a browser. The beginning of a URL, which is located before the two forward slashes in a web address, determines the type of file being accessed. "HTTP" is used to access a hypertext document or directory. "FTP" leads to a file that can be downloaded or a directory of downloadable files. A Web address beginning with "News" refers to a newsgroup.

The second part of a Web address is usually the address of the computer that hosts the data or service. In addition, a Web address may provide a file name, connection port or text string to query in a database. URLs are not case sensitive. They always use forward slashes and do not have spaces. URLs are also known as URIs, or uniform resource identifiers.