Web - URL

About

An Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a universal identifier for a resource.

Because the resource can be created dynamically, an URL is also logically a request.

It's the string that is understood by a browser when you put it in the address bar.

When the HTTP protocol is used as scheme, it's a identifier for a Web resource.

An URL was originally created to provide a method for finding an item such as a person's street address.

On a format level, the URL is a subset of an URI.

Mr. Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web’s bedrock software standards, would get rid of the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses. The double slash, though a programming convention at the time, turned out to not be really necessary, Mr. Berners-Lee explained.

Syntax

scheme://[user-info@]host[:port]/path?query#fragment

where:

Management

Rewrite

See URL - URL Rewrite

Encoding

See What is URL encoding ? known also as Percent-encoding

Length

The lowest common denominator max URL length among popular web browsers is 2100 1)

Shortener

An URL shortener is an application that creates a shorter URL.

Typically:

  • the URL is added to a table with a numerical id
  • with optionally a hash of the URL (to fasten the lookup by hash URL)
  • the numerical id is used in the new shorten version
http://do.com/id

The numerical id based on the decimal system is generally converted to a greater base (ie above 10 with characters ) making it shorter. The hashid library being the most known example.

How to create an identifier

You can create unique same-length identifier via hashing

Note that the version 3 and 5 of UUID specification have an url namespace to create a url hash.

How to get the url of the actual HTML page with Javascript

See Browser URL

Canonical

See HTML - Canonical URL

Documentation / Reference





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