Monthly Archives: September 2011

How the Internet Works 3: URLs

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What is a URL? It’s just the start of a whole bunch of jargon-y acronyms that you’ll find here on the internet. The quick explanation is that a url is just a full name for something on the internet. Last post I talked about domain names, and domain names are just a part of the URL.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but it just means a specific thing on the internet. This may refer to a specific page on my blog, or a specific image you found off Google. Some people who get mad about technical things say that we should really call it URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), but the difference isn’t a big deal here, and most people call things URLs.

Here is an example URL: http://thekeesh.com/?s=domain+names

This has most of the parts of a URL that we care about.

The part that says “http://” or “https://” is the scheme or the protocol. That is just telling us something about the way everything is sent. We’ll talk more about that later. The part that says “thekeesh.com” or www.facebook.com is called the domain, like we talked about before. The part after the domain name but before the question mark is called the “path,” as you can see in the Facebook url, the path is “/jkeesh.” The part starting with the question mark is called the query string and gives a little more information to the URL. I will talk more about query strings in a later post.

That is what a URL is. You may still be confused on the parts of a URL, but we will go into more depth on those later. Whenever you send a “link” to someone, you really send them the URL. It’s just a specific thing on the internet, and the URL is the full name that refers to it.

How the Internet Works 2: Domain Names

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A domain name is one of the most basic pieces of the internet. Basically, it is the way that you refer to a site on the internet, it is its address, or simply its name. Here are some domain names you may have heard of:

www.google.com
www.facebook.com
www.thekeesh.com

These are all domain names. But so is

mail.google.com

and as you can see from this short list, it’s slightly different. It has a different part at the start, which we call a “subdomain,” or something more specific.

On the far right we have the “top level domains,” (or TLDs), like com, edu, gov, and org. (Don’t look now but there is a new xxx TLD.) Then we get more specific with “google,” and even more specific with “www” or “mail.” These names are just ways to identify sites on the internet.

http://www.google.com

There’s also one more funny part in this one, which is “http,” which is the protocol. This is not technically part of the domain name, but we’ll talk more about this in a later post.

The main point here is to understand that there are such things called “domain names,” and they are how you identify websites on the internet. There are different parts and they get more specific going right to left.

How the Internet Works 1: The Browser

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So this is the first post in my series of “How the Internet Works,” where I hope to go through lots of random jargon-y words you’ll find on the internet and explain them in plain english. The first thing I’m going to explain today is the browser, which is basically your gateway into the internet.

But I’ve noticed many people are confused on what the distinction between the “browser” is and what the “internet” is, and if you aren’t familiar with computers, it’s easy to confuse the two. A long time ago, I bet most people thought that AOL was the internet, but we have come a ways since then.

Ok, so here it is. What is a web browser? A web browser is just a program that runs on your computer that lets you access different websites on the internet. If you don’t know what a “program” is, it is just something running on your computer that is doing something for you.

That’s all there is to a browser. It’s nothing too complicated, but let’s try and clarify it with some analogies.

Imagine you are making a phone call to your parents. You could really call anyone through this whole network of phones, but you call a specific person. The phone that you use is your access point to all of the other people in the phone network, but the phone is not the network. In a similar way, the browser is your access point to all of the different websites on this network, but the browser is not the network.

While we can think of the internet being on a lot of different computers, the web browser is really just on your own computer. And like there are many types of phones you can buy to access the phone network (a flip phone, an iPhone, an Android phone), there are different types of browsers you can use to access the internet. Think of different browsers like different brands of phones.

Browsers are generally free, and have adopted many similar features, even though they don’t really have an exact specification of what they need to be. Some browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and the evil Internet Explorer. For me, Internet Explorer feels like using a broken abacus when everybody else is using a calculator. Which is a bummer because so many people still use it (according to here and here). I’d recommend Google Chrome, and you can see raunk for the list of Best Web Browsers.

Here is a quick tour of some important parts of the browser. There is the address bar, where you can type the site you want to go to. There is the bookmark bar where you can save favorite sites. There are tabs so you can have many sites open at the same time. And I’ve highlighted the settings icon in Chrome for reference.

So that’s mainly it. A browser is a program that is on your computer that lets you access the internet. It does a lot of fancy stuff like running javascript and rendering HTML and CSS and a lot more, but that’s not really what this post is about.

If you have any comments, let me know!