If the editors of this digital rag weren’t a bunch of prudish neo-Victorians, I would have made a fun rhyme with the title of this article. It’s a joke. My editors are decent and overworked professionals. I just wanted to start this article in a funny way because too often those of us in the Internet information business try to pretend that what we do is more serious and difficult than it really is, obfuscating the obvious. Defining URL is a perfect example.

The acronym URL for “Uniform Resource Locator” has a nasty habit of appearing unexpectedly in well-written, understandable articles containing common English words and terms. One moment you are happily leafing through the writer’s word trail and the next you are suddenly stopped by the use of a completely unnecessary acronym that has not been memorized.

Most of the time, at least for those of us in the world of everyday web work, URL doesn’t mean more than a certain domain name. If you look further, the technicians will tell you at length that the domain is only part of the definition, that there are actually several other elements in a URL. But who cares if “http: and” ftp: “are protocols. What interests the common reader is the fact that” www “is called a pointer or that com is a top-level domain.

Who cares that the domain name is just one of the web pages at a particular URL that is used to describe one of several IP addresses. And there we go again; spiraling into confusion with another example of the pretentious use of an acronym when two real words would be much more informative. IP in Internet speech means Internet Provider. But if you don’t get through the day using internet art terms, it could mean, according to Webopedia, at least 155 other things like International Paper, Intellectual Property, and even “in particular.” Who needs this kind of mental struggle every time they read an article directed by the Internet?

Here is an example of a URL: < "http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html" >

So what is a URL? Looking at it, you would judge that it is what … a web page? Correct? Exactly! A URL is a specific web page. A resource so to speak. A file. So instead of slapping the reader with a strange acronym, why not just say “web page” instead of showing our internet scholarship and referring to it as a URL?