HTML Uniform Resource Locators
HTML Links
When you click on a link in an HTML document like this: Last
Page, an underlying <a> tag points to a place (an address) on the Web
with an href attribute value like this: <a href="lastpage.htm">Last
Page</a>.
The Last Page link in the example is a link that is relative to the Web site
that you are browsing, and your browser will construct a full Web address like http://www.w3schools.com/html/lastpage.htm
to access the page.
Uniform Resource Locators
Something called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is used to address a
document (or other data) on the
World Wide Web. A full Web address like this: http://www.w3schools.com/html/lastpage.htm
follows these syntax rules:
scheme://host.domain:port/path/filename
The scheme is defining the type of Internet service. The most
common type is http.
The domain is defining the Internet domain name like
w3schools.com.
The host is defining the domain host. If omitted, the default host for
http is www.
The :port is defining the port number at the host. The port
number is normally omitted. The default port number for http is 80.
The path is defining a path (a sub directory) at the server.
If the path is omitted, the resource (the document) must be located at the root
directory of the Web site.
The filename is defining the name of a document. The default filename
might be default.asp, or index.html or something else depending on the settings
of the Web server.
URL Schemes
Some examples of the most common schemes can be found below:
| Schemes |
Access |
| file |
a file on your local PC |
| ftp |
a file on an FTP server |
| http |
a file on a World Wide Web Server |
| gopher |
a file on a Gopher server |
| news |
a Usenet newsgroup |
| telnet |
a Telnet connection |
| WAIS |
a file on a WAIS server |
Accessing a Newsgroup
The following HTML code:
<a href="news:alt.html">HTML Newsgroup</a>
creates a link to a newsgroup like this HTML Newsgroup.
Downloading with FTP
The following HTML code:
<a href="ftp://www.w3schools.com/ftp/winzip.exe">Download WinZip</a>
creates a link to download a file like this:
Download
WinZip.
(The link doesn't work. Don't try it. It is just an example. W3Schools doesn't
really have an ftp directory.)
Link to your Mail system
The following HTML code:
<a href="mailto:someone@w3schools.com">someone@w3schools.com</a>
creates a link to your own mail system like this:
someone@w3schools.com
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