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Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 139

‘send’ message as shown in Figure 3.13. The web pages and graphics transferred in this way
are transferred as packets, which is why web pages do not usually download gradually but
come in jumps as different groups of packets arrive.
The inventor of HTTP, Tim Berners-Lee, describes its purpose as follows (Berners-Lee, 1999):
HTTP rules define things like which computer speaks first, and how they speak in turn.
When two computers agree they can talk, they have to find a common way to represent
their data so they can share it.

Uniform resource locators (URLs)

Web addresses refer to particular pages on a web server which is hosted by a company or
Uniform (universal) organization. The technical name for web address is uniform (or universal) resource locator
resource locator (URL). URLs can be thought of as a standard method of addressing, similar to postcodes or
(URL)
ZIP codes, that make it straightforward to find the name of a site.
A web address used to
locate a web page on a Web addresses always start with ‘http://’, so references to web sites in this book and in
web server. most promotional material from companies omit this part of the URL. Indeed, when using
modern versions of web browsers, it is not necessary to type this in as part of the web page
location since it is added automatically by the web browser. Although the vast majority of
sites start with ‘www’, this is not universal, so it is necessary to specify this.
Web addresses are structured in a standard way as follows:
http://www.domain-name.extension/filename.html

Domain names

The domain name refers to the name of the web server and is usually selected to be the same
as the name of the company, and the extension will indicate its type. The extension is also
commonly known as the generic top-level domain (gTLD). Note that gTLDs are currently
under discussion and there are proposals for adding new types such as .store and .firm.
Common gTLDs are:

(i) .com represents an international or American company such as www.travelocity.com.
(ii) .org are not-for-profit organizations (e.g. www.greenpeace.org)
(iii) .mobi – introduced in 2006 for sites configured for mobile phones
(iv) .net is a network provider such as www.demon.net.
URL strategy

A defined approach to There are also specific country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs):
forming URLs including
the use of capitalization,
hyphenation and (v) .co.uk represents a company based in the UK such as www.thomascook.co.uk.
subdomains for different (vi) .au, .ca, .de, .es, fi, .fr, .it, nl, etc. represents other countries (the co.uk syntax is an
brands and different anomaly!).
locations. This has
implications for (vii) .ac.uk is a UK-based university or other higher education institution (e.g.
promoting a web site www.cranfield.ac.uk).
offline through
promotional or vanity (viii) .org.uk is for an organization focusing on a single country (e.g. www.mencap.org.uk).
URLs, search engine
optimization and The ‘filename.html’ part of the web address refers to an individual web page, for example
findability. ‘products.html’ for a web page summarizing a company’s products.
A clean URL which fits
many of these aims is When a web address is typed in without a filename, for example www.bt.com, the
http://www.domain.com/ browser automatically assumes the user is looking for the home page, which by convention
folder-name/ is referred to as index.html. When creating sites, it is therefore vital to name the home page
document-name. Care
must be taken with index.html (or an equivalent such as index.asp or index.php).
capitalization since Linux The file index.html can also be placed in sub-directories to ease access to information.
servers parse capitals
differently from For example, to access a support page a customer would type www.bt.com/support rather
lower-case letters. than www.bt.com/support/index.htm.