MSN-TV ONLY HELP PAGES

UNDERSTANDING URLs

AND HOW TO GET THEM

URL stands for "Uniform Routing Locator". It is the internet address of a web page.

To find the URL of any web page, hit your "Go To" key while viewing the page and click the "Show Last" button. The URL will appear in the Go To window.

A URL always begins with "http://" and will have some or all of the following components:

Subdomain
Domain
Directory
Subdirectory
Filename
Filetype

Components in a URL must be in the following order:

HTTP://SUBDOMAIN.DOMAIN/DIRECTORY/SUBDIRECTORY/FILENAME.FILETYPE

A simple URL can have only a domain name such as:

http://www.techniguy.com/zone/zone.

A URL with a subdomain would look like this:

http://help.techniguy.com

The subdomain always goes before the domain name and is separated by a period. In the above example, "help" is the subdomain and "techniguy.com" is the domain.

The following example uses a directory name:

http://www.techniguy.com/zone/zone

Where "wtv-zone.com" is the domain name and "/techniguy" is the directory name. Notice that components that follow the domain name use a slash mark between them instead of a period.

A subdirectory is another directory that is contained within a parent directory:

http://www.techniguy.com/zone/helpsite

Here, "/helpsite" is the subdirectory contained within the "/techniguy" directory.

There can be more than one subdirectory in a URL:

http://www.techniguy.com/zone/helpsite/wtv

This URL shows a sub-subdirectory "/wtv" contained within the "/helpsite" subdirectory.

The final component in a URL is the filename. If the filename is not used in the URL, then the browser will default to the "index.html" page in that directory. If no "index.html" page exists, then a server generated index page may be displayed. A filename will always have the file type shown, separated by a period from the name of the file.

http://www.techniguy.com/zone/helpsite/wtv/setfkey.html

Here, "/setfkey" is the filename and ".html" is the file type and identifies the file as an "html" file.

Every URL must have "http://" and a domain name. The rest of the URL will be determined by the way the website directories are laid out.

While viewing this page, hit your "Go To" key and click the "Show Last" button. You should see the URL of this page:

http://www.techniguy.com/zone/helpsite/wtv/url.html