URL's -- what works.

Note: at the end of this document is a description of what your URL should look like. Material prior to that is an explanation of why it should.

Don't use spaces or punctuation in web file names. (Unless you can anticipate exactly what problems it will cause for you and those who visit your web pages.)

You may think of at URL as an address which uniquely specifies a resource (like a web page or a machine) on the Internet [1].

Accordingly, such addresses as

http://www.sru.edu

http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/

telnet://granite.sru.edu

would all qualify since each contains information sufficient to instruct the web browser to unambiguously locate these internet resources.

However, addresses like

Z:\srufaculty\david.dailey\cs130\index.htm

or

H:\mystuff\good.html

or

C:\web\c\colors.html (or even  the synonymous file:\\C:\web\c\colors.html  or

file:///C:/web/c/colors.html)

would not satisfy this definition since they refer to pathnames on local (or local area network-mounted) hard drives that are a) possibly not accessible through the Internet and b) addressed through non-uniform (locally defined) addressing schemes.

Examples:

Generally, if a path contains a drive letter (like C: or Z:) don't use it as a part of your URL -- it is not "uniform."

Note: the URL of your class web space will look something like:

http://webclass.sru.edu/CPSC-130-01.0110/QXQ1234/assignment4.htm

(But with your course number and section,  your username and your filename.)

To make this more concrete, if you are in cpsc130 section 03 then your URL will look something like

http://webclass.sru.edu/CPSC-130-03.0112/yourname/yourfile.htm

Instead of typing "yourname" though you should type your windows username.

Instead of typing "yourfile.htm", you should type the name of your HTML document.

The particular string of letters that follows "http://webclass.sru.edu" will include the course number, section and semester.

• One more thing to remember: don't use spaces or punctuation (other than one period) in your filenames -- it is not a good idea for web files (for reasons too numerous to mention here).

You may be prompted to login. If so, use

   srunet\yourusername

as the login, and your SRU windows password as your password. Also note that even if you can't login (our systems folks will be working on this) the above format of the URL should be valid.

Technical notes on the definition of the URL:

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) which "develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web" defines URL as follows:

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. The set of URI schemes that have explicit instructions on how to access the resource on the internet.

Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL gives a slightly simpler explanation:

Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it

The relationship between URL's and URIs is clarified at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Relationship_to_URL_and_URN