Internet addresses tell your computer where to send e-mail or look for a Web page. Without an address, your computer won't know where to start looking.
A. E-mail Addresses Look Like This:
janedoe@provider.com
The "janedoe" part is the screen name of the person you're e-mailing to, and the "provider.com" part tells your computer who is their Internet service provider, a company which gives access to e-mail and/or the World Wide Web. When you've finished writing your e-mail to janedoe@provider.com and click Send, the e-mail goes to the computers at Jane's Internet service provider, and those computers look for Jane Doe and send the mail to her.
B. Web Addresses Look Like This:
http://www.cayuga-cc.com/search/index.html
A Web address is "officially" called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). They're long and sometimes confusing, but once you know what each part means, they're easy to understand.
* The first part of the address tells your Web browser, the piece of software which lets you access the World Wide Web, what kind of address it is. To the computer, "http://" means "Web address."
* Next is the domain name, and your browser looks at the domain name, in this case www.cayuga-cc.com, to figure out which machine it needs to visit to start looking for your request. The end of the address (.edu, .com, .gov, .org, .net) indicates the type of organization
Current Top Level Domains
.edu - educational
.org - non profit organization
.com - for profit commercial organization
.gov -government agency
.net - an organization affiliated with the internet
.mil - a military agency
.biz = businesses
.info
.name = for personal web pages
.pro = for professionals like doctors and lawyers
.museum
.aero = aerospace industry
.coop = co-operatives
Unfortunately, anyone can sell their URL so sometimes you
may see a site like www.syracuse.org that is really a commercial site
* http://www.cayuga-cc.com/search/index.html Sometimes, an address will also include directories or files at the end of the address. In our example, we already know that http://www.cayuga-cc.com means that we're looking for a Web page on a computer at cayuga-cc. The "/search/" portion of the URL tells your browser to look in the folder called "search" on the www.cayuga-cc.com computer, and the "index.html" portion tells your browser to grab the file "index.html" out of that directory and put it in your Web browser for you to look at.
Sometimes an address refers to a different computer than than
the main web server at that site. The address http://m331.cayuga-cc.edu/barth/bbhome.html
refers to a computer named M331 that is connected to the Cayuga web server.
C. FTP and gopher addresses work the same way as Web addresses, but they start with ftp:// and gopher:// instead of http://
example ftp://ftp.cayuga-cc.edu
How To Connect To an FTP Site:
Click the text box on the navigation bar, and type ftp followed by a colon (:)
and two forward slashes (//), and then type the site's address. For example: ftp://ftp.cayuga-cc.edu/pub/barth/.
This takes us to the Barth folder in the Public
folder
The FTP site appears. Anonymous FTP sites allow access to basically anyone, but require that users log in as anonymous and provide their e-mail address as password. If a site does not permit anonymous log-ins, a dialog box prompts you to enter this personal information, which you must have secured from someone at the site beforehand.
D. Newsgroup Addresses Look Like
This:
news://comp.privacy
* The news:// part of the address means the address points to a newsgroup.
* The rest of the address is the name of the group. There is a hierarchy where newsgroups are grouped into main categories like comp., biz, sci, alt. Then each category has subcategories in it. For example, in comp.privacy, the "comp" part tell us it is part of computer-related newsgroups, and "privacy" tells us that it is the newsgroup whose purpose is to discuss privacy issues related to technology.