Glossary

From Well Designed Urls WiKi

This is a glossary of terms related to URLs.

The goal of this glossary is to describe in layman's terms as opposed to the more rigorous definitions found on The W3C Website, i.e. these glossary terms should, as much as possible, be described in plain English. Examples should be given whenever possible to provide a reasonable understanding for those not immersed in the rigor of abstract specification language.

If you have concerns about the correctness of existing definitions,please use the Discussion/Talk page. In addition, each term has the potential for it's own wiki page on which you can create a section entitled "Rigorous Definition" (or maybe even there is better term we can use to name the section?) On the other hand, if you feel the term is described using too much jargon, please do try and improve it.

NOTE: This is a work in progress: The definitions are currently unfinished and none of the terms have been given their own page yet. In the process of creating a page for each term, we might simplify the description of the term on this page but care should be taken to avoid requiring the reader to drill down to get an even cursory understanding of the term. The goal is to make the descriptions at once both complete and concise.

Contents 1 Terms 1.1 A-E 1.2 F-K 1.3 L-P 1.4 Q-T 1.5 U-Z 2 See Also 3 Footnotes

Terms

A-E

• ASCII - An acryonm for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange", in the context of URLs ASCII refers to the characters used to specify a URL [~]
• Authority - The component of a URL that comes after the Scheme and its punctuation (i.e. "http://") and before the Path (i.e. "/computers/apple/powerbook/"). Authority usually equals [Host], but can also be prefixed with a "Userinfo@" and suffixed with a ":Port", i.e. "http://mikes@www.guidesinc.com:1020/" (we included the leading "http://" and the trailing "/" to give you context but neither is part of the Authority) [~]
• Content-Type - [~]
• Deep Linking - [~]
• Dereference = To retrieve the document/content (a.k.a. Resource) available by Requesting the URL [~]
• Domain Name - A name registered in the DNS. Often in the form "www.domain.tld" where "www" is a convention implying a website (but it could be something else like "mail" or "atlanta"), "domain" is the name as chosen by the registered organization, and "tld" identifies the Top Level Domain (i.e. "www.microsoft.com" and "www.google.com") [~]
• DNS - The global domain name system registery. Can also refer to a DNS Server [~]
• DNS Server - [~]

F-K

• Fragment - The value comes after a "#" in a URL. Each Scheme and Content-Type defines what that means, but for HTTP and HTML it is used essentially as a bookmark. [~]
• ftp - Initialism for File Transfer Protocol and the "ftp" Scheme [~]
• Hex - Shorthand for Hexadecimal.
• Hexadecimal - A "base 16" numbering system as opposed to our standard "base 10" "Decimal" numbering system. Hex "digits" are "0123456789ABCDEF" whereas decimal digits are just "0123456789." The numbers Zero and Nine both use the same digits in hex and decimal ("0" and "9" respectively), but anything above Nine uses different digits. For example, in hex Ten (10) is "A", Fifteen (15) is "F", Sixteen (16) is "10", and 255 in hex is "FF." Hex is popular notation for computer systems which natively "think" in binary as hex is based on powers of two (i.e. 2^8 is 255, or "FF" in hex) See Hexadecimal Chart for more examples. [~]
• Host - The component of a URL that (indirectly) identifies the machine(s) to process an dereference request. Hosts are usually specified by Domain Name, IP addresses, or named like "Localhost") [~]
• HTML - Initialism for Hypertext Markup Language [~]
• http - Initialism for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the "http" Scheme [~]
• Hypertext - [~]
• IP address - On the widely known Internet (as of 2006), a four digit number that is the address of a device on the network (i.e. 192.168.0.1) [~]
• IRI - (International Resource Identifier): [~]

L-P

• Localhost - The host name alias for the computer that is Dereferencing the URL [~]
• mailto - Initialism for the "mailto" Scheme [~]
• Markup Language - [~]
• Normalization - The process of converting a URL into a standardized form so that two URLs can be compared for equivalence. For example, Domain Names are not case sensitive, spaces in Paths must be Percent-Encoded, and Paths themselves *are* case sensitive (must to my chargin) [~]
• Percent-Encoding - A method of representing a Reserved Character in a URL during Normalization where the character is replaced with a "%" and then the Hexadecimal value of the character, i.e. "Hello World" would become "Hello%20World" because the ASCII value of a space is 20 in hexdecimal (32 in decimal) [~]
• Path - Component of a URL that comes after the Authority (except in the special case of Relative URLs) and comprises either the rest of the URL or up until a Query or a Fragment, whichever covers first (beginning with a "?" and "#", respectively.) An empty Path is assumed to be a "/" (i.e. given the URL "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201570181/?ie=UTF8&s=books" the path would be "/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201570181/") [~]
• Port - Optional component of Authority; an integer after the Host seperated by a ":" (i.e. http://www.example.com:8080). Administrators configure servers to "listen" for Client Requests for a given Protocol "on" a specific Port. Said another way, if the port number the client sends with a request doesn't equal the port the server expects, then the server won't respond. Each protocol with a registered Scheme has a default Well-Known Port which is port assumed in a URL when none is specified (i.e. The well-known port for http is 80, thus using http://www.cnn.com:80 is the same as using http://www.cnn.com) [~]
• Protocol - [~]

Q-T

• Query - Optional component of URL after "?" that contains names and values, associated by "=" and seperated by "&" (i.e. ?make=Honda&model=Civic&year=2006) [~]
• Relative URLs - [~]
• Representation - [~]
• Request - [~]
• Reserved Character - [~]
• Resource - [~]
• Response - [~]
• Search Engine Optimization - Process of designing website content and architecture to improve search engine result page rankings [~]
• Scheme - The beginning of a URL that idenfies the purpose (Protocol) and syntax of the URL (i.e. http, ftp, mailto, etc.) [~]
• SEO - Initialism for Search Engine Optimization
• Subdomain - Refers to the part of a Host name to the left a Domain Name, separated by a ".", and which is also a Domain Name itself (i.e. "mail.aol.com" is a subdomain of "aol.com", and "www.coc.gatech.edu" is a subdomain of "coc.gatech.edu" which is a subdomain of "gatech.edu") [~]
• Tim Berners-Lee - Father of the web. [~]
• TLD - Initialism for Top Level Domain
• Top Level Domain - Refers both to the right-most component of a Domain Name and the organization that registers related subdomains names for that "com", "net", "org", "edu", etc. The "tld" component can also be country-specific (i.e. "us" for United States, "uk" for United Kingdom, "de" for Germany, and "ca" for Canada") [~]

U-Z

• URI - (Uniform Resource Identifier): [~]
• URL - (Uniform Resource Locator): [~]
• URN - (Uniform Resource Name): [~]
• Userinfo - Component of Authority that names/identifies a user [~]
• W3C - Acronym for the "World Wide Web Consortium"
• Web Science - The goal of Web Science is to both understand the web's growth and to encourage beneficial patterns of further growth [~]
• World Wide Web Consortium - The non-profit steering body for web architecture founded by Tim Berners-Lee [~]
• Well-Known Port - The Port number associated with a published Scheme [~]

See Also

• URLs vs. URIs.

Footnotes

[~]: Need better description.