Every page on the Web has a unique address, called it's URL. Somewhere at the top of your browser you should see the letters URL: or Location: followed by the URL of this page (http://webcom.com/~webcom/glossary/URL.shtml). In addition, every hotlink has a URL behind it telling the browser which resource to fetch if the user clicks on that link. If you point your mouse at a hotlink without actually clicking on it, most graphical browsers show you the URL of that link at the bottom of the browser window, in the status bar. If you're using Lynx, pressing the equal sign (=) will allow you to see both the URL of the current page as well as the URL of the currently selected link (hotlink). A URL has the following format:

server_type://domain.name/subdir/file

The server_type is one of:

http,ftp,gopher,wais

for each of the types of servers a Web browser can connect to. For connecting to a Usenet News server, the syntax is somewhat different:

news:newgroup.name

or to make a clickable link to send email:

mailto:Santa@northpole.org

And the domain name of your news (NNTP) server must be configured in your browser. The reason a news server is specified in a static configuration option rather than directly in the URL is that normally you'd only use one news server for all your news, whereas with the other types of servers you are more often connecting to various different servers.

For more information about these different types of servers which a URL may reference, see our Introduction to the World Wide Web.

For more information on URLs, see the NCSA URL primer.