URLs: It's complicated...

I think we need to talk... It's not you, it's me. My relationship status with all things computers is best described as "it's complicated". We're frenemies. One of us doesn't seem to like the other. Let me show you what I mean.

Everybody knows what a URL looks like, right? Something like https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html. Easy enough. We have a protocol ("https"), a hostname ("www.netmeister.org"), and a pathname ("/blog/urls.html").

Now, a URL is not something that's only used in the context of a web browser and web server. RFC3986 gives us all the details, leading us to draw a more accurate URL breakdown as:

That's easy enough to understand, and if you've been around the internet for even just a little while, you'll have seen just about every variation of each of these elements:

Y'all know about schemes, right? We sometimes call that part the protocol, but that's actually incorrect, as this is entirely a description of the remainder of the URL, not necessarily of the protocol that is spoken.

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