Page 263 - Foundations of Learning, 4th Edition (Revised)

address.

http:// This indicates that the site you’re looking at is a hypertext document. Hypertext is text that
does more than just sit there; it is interactive, ‘clickable’, or linked to other text, images, or
data. Most web sites are actually hypertext documents that interact when viewed in a web
browser.

www This stands for World Wide Web, which is actually interlinked hypertext documents,
accessible through the Internet.

nasa.gov This part of the URL is the domain name. This is the online ‘home’ of the person
or organization (in this case the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: NASA).
You can find out to whom a domain name belongs by performing a WHOIS query. A good
site to do this is: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/ Be aware that domain names
can be illegally registered, so this information is not 100% reliable.

.gov This part of the URL is the domain extension and can give you some clue to the purposes
of the individual or organization sponsoring the site. Although the following extensions are
not absolute, they are still somewhat reliable (though that is changing over time).

.gov U.S. Government sponsored site

.com Commercial site

.org Non-profit organization sponsored site

.edu Educational organizations (schools, libraries, etc.)

.net Network providers (sometimes also Internet Service Providers)

others The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (www.iana.org) has an online database
that shows all domain extensions (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/). Each
country and sponsoring organization has been assigned a 2-character domain name
extension. “.ca” is Canada, while “.uk” is the United Kingdom. You can tell by these
extensions when a domain name is registered in a particular country. Note that this
does not mean that the sponsor resides in that country.

/audience/forstudents/index.html The information after the domain name tells us in what folders
the document exists. In this case, there is a folder named “audience” that exists on the domain.
And within that folder is a folder titled “forstudents”. The final piece, “index.html” is the name
of the actual document (web page). Home or main pages tend to be named “index” or “home”;
this is the default page that will show up within the “forstudents” folder. (Try entering the URL
and leave off everything after “forstudents/” —the same document/site will still appear.

So what does all this tell us? Looking at our sample URL, we can determine that the site is probably an
interactive document that exists on the World Wide Web, that it is sponsored by a U.S. governmental
agency (in this case NASA), and that the site is at least 2-levels deep within the site. Sometimes a URL
will include a hash mark (#); this indicates that you’re viewing a document at the point of a bookmark.
Other times, a URL may include a tilde (~); this means that the entire URL is hidden and you’re viewing
a sub-folder located somewhere on the domain. This is often the way that student pages are referenced
from a university site: http://www.universityname.edu/~mypage.html. When you see a tilde, be aware that
you’re not being shown the whole URL.

Chapter 10 — Finding and Working with Sources 257