A URL will be something like YouTube.com/r7@usq=616UUhF
What is all the jargon at the end?
Thanks in advance
In: Engineering
It would have been a lot better if you just copy pasted a real YouTube URL, because that’s not what it looks like.
The first part of the URL, before the `://`, is the protocol, which determines how you are communicating with the server and what the data being sent means. For websites, it’s http (hypertext transfer protocol) or, for most modern sites, the encrypted https. But other protocols exist, like ftp (file transfer protocol), and other types of programs like databases use urls that start with, for example, `mysql://`.
The next parts of the url are `subdomain.domain.tld` where tld stands for top level domain. You kind of read this part backwards, actually, since the tld is the biggest category and the subdomain is the most specific category. This basically says which server you’re communicating with.
After the domain is whatever is after the slash `/` which is the path. It’s essentially the server’s responsibility to decide what to do with the path, but this often specifies the specific page on the server that you want to see. This is optional, and if you omit it, the server will just serve you the “root” page.
Then another optional part comes after a question mark `?`. This is the query, which is a standard way of giving the site specific extra parameters. The parameters are written as `name=value` and separated by ampersands `&`. This is extra information that is processed by the server. Some pages have required query parameters, and will give you an error if any are missing, but that’s all up to the server software.
For YouTube, the most common query parameter is `v` which stands for the video ID. So you might see a query like `?v=3MKpDA56-LivQKhH` which means “show the video with the ID “3MKpDA56-LivQKhH”. The video ID is basically just a random sequence of characters chosen by YouTube to uniquely identify the video (if they just used the title of the video, it could be too long, many videos could have the same title, the title could contain bad words or characters that some users’ computers don’t support etc., so it’s best for the server to choose its own random, unique identifier).
Other parts of the query could tell the server how you got to the site. A link posted to social media might have `referrer=twitter.com` for example, so that when a user clicks that link, the server knows you came there from Twitter. And yes, it’s called Twitter.
And that’s basically it. There’s also the `#` but that’s less commonly used these days.
Latest Answers