HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
6.2. Referencing Documents: The URL
Every document on the Web has a unique address. (Imagine the chaos
if they didn't.) The document's address is known as its
uniform resource
locator
(URL).
[ ]
[
]
"URL" usually is pronounced "you are ell," not "earl."
Several HTML/XHTML tags include a URL attribute value, including hyper-
links, inline images, and forms. All use the same URL syntax to specify
the location of a web resource, regardless of the type or content of that
resource. That's why it's known as a
uniform
resource locator.
Because they can be used to represent almost any resource on the Inter-
net, URLs come in a variety of flavors. All URLs, however, have the same
top-level syntax:
scheme
:
scheme_specific_part
The
scheme
describes the kind of object the URL references; the
scheme_specific_part
is, well, the part that is peculiar to the specific
scheme. The important thing to note is that the
scheme
is always sep-
arated from the
scheme_specific_part
by a colon, with no intervening
spaces.
6.2.1. Writing a URL
Write URLs using the displayable characters in the US-ASCII character
set. For example, surely you have heard what has become annoyingly
common on the radio for an announced business web site: "h, t, t, p,
colon, slash, slash, w, w, w, dot, blah-blah, dot, com." That's a simple
URL, written:
http://www.blah-blah.com
