URL - Uniform Resource Locator

URL is the abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator. It is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. For example, www.webopedia.com is a URL. A URL is one type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); the generic term for all types of names and addresses that refer to objects on the World Wide Web.

Parts of a URL

The first part of the URL is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use, and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located. The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.

 

For example, the two URLs below point to two different files at the domain webopedia.com. The first specifies an executable file that should be fetched using the FTP protocol; the second specifies a Web page that should be fetched using the HTTP protocol:

ftp://www.webopedia.com/stuff.exe
http://www.webopedia.com/index.html

Web Address is a URL with HTTP/HTTPS

The term "Web address" is a synonym for a URL that uses the HTTP or HTTPS protocol. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) URI working group. Today, the format of the URL has not changed. The URL format is specified in RFC 1738 Uniform Resource Locators (URL).