How Do URLs Work?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
1,034 words · ~5 min read
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if you've ever you know used the internet which you've probably done
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considering you're watching this video you've almost certainly typed in a
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uniform resource locator or URL to get
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where you're going online but while some are simple like line ofc tapes.com or
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whitehouse.gov fulllength URLs can look awfully confusing why do we need HTTP in
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there and what are all those Amber Sands question marks and pound or excuse me
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hash signs doing it's a good question let's demystify the ingredients of your
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typical web address starting with the beginning of the scheme the most
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familiar will probably be HTTP which stands for hypertext transfer protocol
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the set of commands that handles the transmission of web pages but there are
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other schemes as well if you've ever clicked on an email address you might
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notice that the link starts with mail to a scheme that tells the browser to open
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up your email clients you can fire off a message there's Al FTP or file transfer
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protocol which is used to send well
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files as you probably guess to and from remote servers and even IRC which allows
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you to connect directly to a chat room the next part of a typical URL is
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usually a domain name the name of a website like Amazon.com or microsoft.com
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the doc.net or.org at the end is called
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a top level domain or TLD which you can
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think of as the main cat categories that sort every website on the internet and
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help route requests through a certain group of servers to get you to the
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correct website typically will indicate a commercial website of some sort .org
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indicates a nonprofit organization and there are plenty of tlds that indicate
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sites associated with a certain country like us oruk more recently country-based
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tlds have been used in so-called domain hacks like
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youtube.be which allows links to YouTube videos to be shorter this doesn't mean
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however that the site has anything to do with the kingdom of Belgium much of the
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rest of the URL the part that is separated by slashes indicates the path
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or the specific location of the page or
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other piece of content on the specific website each slash indicates another
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subfolder kind of like how files on your computer storage Drive are organized as
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for question marks these make a URL hard to read but their existence actually
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makes a lot of sense they indicate a query defined by the user for example if
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you type a search into Google you'll see your string in the results page URL
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after the question mark symbol which tells the server to execute that search
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if a URL has multiple queries these will be separated by Amber sance showing that
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the browser is relaying multiple pieces of information to the website such as
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what kind of browser you using or whether you were referred to a page from
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a certain site and if you've ever clicked a link just to have it send you
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somewhere else on the same page that was probably done through a fragment
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indicated by a pound sign fragments can Mark specific spots on a web page but
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can also indicate other things like the folder you're looking at in Gmail URLs
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can also incorporate a few rarely seen variations for example if you're trying
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to access a website that requires a login and password some sites will allow
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you to just enter the username and password in the URL directly logging you
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in automatically venient if you need to quickly share a link to a protected site
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but not the best thing for security as your browser history will show your
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password in plain text and if you've
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ever visited a site based in a country that doesn't use Latin characters like
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Greece or China you might see a really weird domain name that includes xn dot
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this means that the original characters were converted into a domain name
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compatible with the DNS so computers worldwide can view these pages but if
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the path after the domain name contains special characters you'll probably see
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these displayed with percent encoding
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which is also sometimes used for other symbols for example percent sign 24
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corresponds to a dollar sign so I hope this helped unpack the mystifying stuff
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you see in web addresses now if you'll excuse me I've got to get back to my IRC
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discussion on whether ninja or meme are
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actually good top level domains I think they are but some other unscrupulous
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people disagree tunnel bear VPN lets you tunnel to up to
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20 different countries allowing you to browse the internet and use online
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services as if you're in that other country they have easy to use apps for
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internet connection to your new location when you do turn tunnel bear on two
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things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption
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and your public IP address gets switched so you show up as if you're in that
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save 10% by going to Tunnel bear.com Linus thanks for watching guys if you
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like this video like it if you dislike this video dislike it get subscribed and
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Channel Super Fun because they are fun and super and I'm going to go now so
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that Alex can walk walk by go ahead
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there we go best part of the video 10 out of 10 we'll do it again bye guys