The Netcenter's

What are Addresses?

When you arranged your connection to the Internet, you chose an account name for you. Your account name became your e-mail address. The distinguishing character of an e-mail address is the '@' sign. An e-mail address looks something like this: lite@netcenter.com.

This address is made up of your name or company name(in the example, lite) followed by your domain name (company.com). The last three (or sometimes two) letters after the dot (it is a period, but it's called a dot) indicate a bit about you and your account. For example, com indicates a business account; edu indicates an educational account; gov indicates a government account. There are many different domain extensions including extensions for most countries. CA is Canada, UK is Great Britain, FR is France, and so on.

Other Internet addresses are called URLs, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator. To connect to other computers you must know their address (URL). Case is important in a URL: lite@netcenter.com is not equal to Lite@Netcenter.Com.

There are several different types of URLs, but the most common are for the World Wide Web (WWW) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

To connect to a specific address on the World Wide Web, you can use an HTTP URL. All World Wide Web URLs begin with http://. In fact, many people don't even bother including the http:// part of their WWW URL anymore when they give out their Web address. The http:// is taken for granted. A WWW URL will point your browser at a specific computer on the net and a specific document (or page) on that computer. Our Home Site is http://www.netcenter.com. Typing in a WWW URL at your browser is one way to visit a site. You can also use hypertext links that point to a WWW URL.

If you are trying to transfer a file between computers, you'll need the remote computer's FTP address. FTP URLs begin with ftp://.

There are also URLs for Gopher, Telnet, and Usenet News that are similar in nature.