- Uniform Resource Locator.
A URL provides a standard way to address any resource on the internet.
URLs are expressed as a text string of the form:
protocolis any valid protocol, such as http, ftp, gopher etc.
One example of a URL that most people are now familiar with is the web address of each site and page.
URLs are defined by RFC1738 and RFC1808.
Whilst the HTTP specification does not limit the length of a URL, most browsers do have a limiting maximum size. Whilst this limit is far in excess of most browsing requests, current limits are:
Browser / Server Limit Source Internet Explorer (browser) 2083 characters Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 208427 Netscape (browser) No limit Apache (web server) 8190 characters (default) www.jetools.com/content/resources/whitepapers/HTTP_GET_Requests.pdf IIS 6.0 (web server) 16KB
For more information see:
- http://everything.explained.at/Uniform_Resource_Locator/ - URLs explained.