URLs – user-friendly addressing

I've been taking a very basic approach to explaining the nature of locating resources so far. I'm certainly aware, though, that most of you probably have at least some idea of how that happens in, at the very least, a high-level context. Hell, you likely used a web browser to find this book in the first place, and had a pretty solid idea that the long string of seemingly random words and letters strung together in your browsers address bar was, in fact, a URL. However, I have certainly met my fair share of developers who were surprised to learn exactly how URLs are constructed and used. So, much as we've done so far, we're going to start with a very basic explanation of what exactly URLs are, and how we can use them to find what we need.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a universally agreed-upon standard for (unsurprisingly) locating resources on the web. It does so by specifying the mechanism by which to retrieve the resource, as well as the specific route over which to retrieve it. It does so by specifying the order of, and delimiters between, specific components that collectively define the specific physical location of any resource. The specification will initially seem complicated, but will become more intuitive as we elaborate on the components and the responsibilities they hold.