Addresses for web sites are called URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). Most of them begin with the protocol used to access web pages, http (HyperText Transfer Protocol), followed by a colon and two slashes. Many web addresses include www, but this is not always the case. For example, the URL for FIRN’s web site is and the URL for the Florida Center for Instructional Technology is . The different parts of a URL are divided by a period.

Each part of a URL contains certain information. The first field is the host name, identifying a single computer or organization. The last field is the top-level domain, describing the type of organization and occasionally country of origin associated with the address. Below are some common Top Level Domains (TLD’s):

.com Commercial
.edu Educational
.gov US Government
.mil US Military
.net Networking Providers
.org Non-profit Organization

Current domain name country codes include, but are not limited to:

.au Australia
.de Germany
.fr France
.nl Netherlands
.uk United Kingdom
.us United States


In this example, “default.htm” is the name of the file which is in a directory named “holocaust” on the FCIT server at the University of South Florida. A convention used when creating websites is that the first page created for the site is named index.html or default.html. Web browsers are configured to access this file if a specific file name is not included in the URL used to access a site.

Bookmark and Share