Uniform Resource Identifiers
According to the W3C’s information on addressing (http://www.w3.org/Addressing/), a Uniform Resource Identifier is defined as “The generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources.” A URL, Uniform Resource Locator, is defined as “An informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.”
Thus, when speaking of URIs in this book, I will refer exclusively to URLs. Let us examine all of the pieces of a URL using a hypothetical one. Refer to RFC 1808 for the official specification.
http://myname:mypass@httphandbook.org:80/mydir/myfile.html?myvar=myvalue#myfrag
| http | scheme (protocol) |
| myname | username (optional) |
| mypass | password ... |
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