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Sir Tim Berners-Lee and URLs

2:23 with Joy Kesten

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. In his pursuit, he standardized many of the processes needed to make computers talk to each other. Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, are one of those processes.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Example of a full URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/business/economy/jobs-report-unemployment-february.html

Example of a clean URL: nytimes.com

Fun Fact: The word "hypertext" was invented by Ted Nelson the early 1960s.

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    As you saw in the last video, URL's, domain names, IP addresses and

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    DNS are all quite closely tied to one another.

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    But because there's so many interesting things about each one,

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    every video in this stage will go over each in more detail.

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    Let's start with URL's and the man who invented them, Sir Tim Burners-Lee.

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    Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989.

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    In his pursuit, he standardized many of the processes needed to make

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    computers talk to each other.

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    Uniform resource locators, or URLs are one of those processes.

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    One of the most wonderful parts of the web is how everything is connected.

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    Web pages are connected using what's called hyperlinks.

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    And behind every hyperlink is a URL.

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    Hyperlinks often look like the blue, underlined words on the page.

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    But they can also look like a lot of things these days, such as images or

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    buttons.

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    For example,

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    here on the YouTube page, Hyperlinks look like the titles of the videos.

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    When you click on one of these links,

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    your computer takes this URL to get a copy of the next webpage you request.

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    If the URL starts with http, the protocol used for the web,

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    the next bit in the URL, after the colon and two slashes, is the domain name.

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    Like teamtreehouse.com.

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    Any information after the domain name describes the full path to the resource.

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    However, more and more URLs have become shorter and shorter.

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    Nowadays, nearly everything is omitted in the address bar, including the http://,

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    the port number, and the full path to the resource.

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    The omission of all these details are called clean URLs.

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    But don't be deceived.

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    Just because you can't see these details, doesn't mean they're not there.

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    The one detail that's always left is the domain name, like teamtreehouse.com.

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    While this domain name will help users find resources on the web,

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    computers don't use names to find things.

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    They use numbers, and the numbers are called IP addresses.

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    Now that you're familiar with the parts of a URL, let's break down a few of those

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    parts in the next video, when we talk about domain names and IP addresses.

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