Example URLs

The URL for Frankfurt University is: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de
(de for Deutschland)

The slowest part of using the Web is loading the pictures (they take up more space than text). If this is a problem you can speed things up by turning off automatic image loading via the Options menu of your browser. The browser inserts a dummy picture to show where the real picture should go. The dummy picture looks something like this:

After the country part of the URL the rest identifies which particular page it refers to - in the same way as the pathname of a file. This Web page is a text file called urls.html.

Most of the time you will follow links to new pages but you may also be given written URLs. On the File menu will be an option to Open Location or Open URL - this will bring up a box you can type the URL into. Be careful not to include any spaces. Try connecting to the UK Government's Web site, the URL is:
http://www.open.gov.uk/

If you can see a button labelled Open at the top of the page it does the same thing as the menu option. Also, if you can see the URL at the top of the page then you can edit this directly.

The http part means that you are using one part of the Web. Other URLs can start with telnet, ftp, gopher or news. ftp and gopher will present you will lists of files but telnet will call an external program such as WinQVT/Net (on the PC) or NCSA Telnet (on the Macintosh). A separate guide is available to explain the differences between the various types of URL.

Sometimes Web sites may not respond at all, this is usually because:

• the URL is wrong (computers are very picky about exact punctuation)
• things are too busy (there is a traffic jam on the information superhighway)
• the URL of the page has changed
• a computer somewhere along the way has crashed