What is a URL

When you ask the browser to fetch a page from a server, you type in a string, and address: the URL.

The URL is composed by the first part that determines the protocol.

http:// or https:// signal we want to use HTTP or HTTPS (secure HTTP).

Then we have the server address, which can be a domain name or an IP.

google.com or 142.251.209.14.

Combined, the protocol and address look like this:https://google.com

Then there’s the path of the document on the server. Anything appended to the address part represents the document path.

For example, I have a page on my website flaviocopes.com, its URL is: https://flaviocopes.com/debugging/

• https is the protocol.

• flaviocopes.com is the domain name that points to the server

• /debugging/ is the document URL relative to the server root path.

The web server is responsible for interpreting the request and, once analyzed, serving the correct response back to the client.