A URL will be something like YouTube.com/r7@usq=616UUhF
What is all the jargon at the end?
Thanks in advance
In: Engineering
What they mean depends on the website in question. In the case of your YouTube example, those letters are just a unique ID tag for a specific video. They don’t mean anything, themselves.
However, for example, reddit organizes things differently. The URL for this post is “https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d1dszg/eli5_what_do_all_the_characters_in_a_url_mean/”.
“https://” is “How should your browser talk to this server?”
“www.reddit.com” is “What server do I need to find to talk to?”
And all of the rest is “What should I ask that server for?”
The only meaning that has is what the reddit servers have decided they have, but it’s very common to break these into parts with “/” like folders on your computer. In this case, we have:
– “r”: “I want to look inside a specific subreddit”
– “explainlikeimfive”: The name of the subreddit
– “comments”: I want to look at the comments page for a post
– “1d1dszg”: This is a random, meaningless, unique ID code, just like YouTube’s
– “eli5_what_do_all_the_characters_in_a_url_mean”: This one doesn’t actually mean anything (you can even change it!), but reddit puts it on the end so that humans have a way to get a basic idea of what the post is about, since you and I can’t look up the random ID code “1d1dszg” in our database (brain).
There are other conventions like “after the ‘?’ comes a list of “X=Y” pairs, encoded in a specific way that keeps them from being ambiguous, but ultimately it’s up to the server to decide how it wants to interpret everything before the (optional) ‘#’. Anything after that isn’t sent to the server at all. Your browser (and the page’s javascript) use that for other purposes.
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