NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows User's Guide

Structure of a URL

The first item in a URL specifies the type of server on which the file resides and the protocol to be used in retrieving the document:
HTTP server
http://
FTP server
file:// or ftp://
Gopher server
gopher://
WAIS server
wais://
Telnet server
telnet://

The second item in a URL specifies a machine on the Internet. This is usually a machine name that can be decoded by a domain name server. Sometimes you will find URLs that contain hard-coded IP addresses, a practice that should be generally avoided.

The third item in a URL is the full pathname for the file.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-win@ncsa.uiuc.edu