Wirebook › Lesson 2 of 18

Anatomy of a web address

About 5 minutes · hands-on · nothing you type leaves your browser unless a button says so

A web address looks like a jumble, but every piece has a job. Paste any address below and it gets taken apart in your browser. It's never sent anywhere.

What each part does

Scheme https://

How to talk to the server. The s means secure: the conversation is encrypted. Plain http can be read by anyone on the same Wi-Fi.

Host shop.example.co.uk

Which computer to talk to. Read it from the right: .uk is the country, example.co.uk is who owns it, and shop. is a sub-part they chose. Only the owner can make names ending in example.co.uk, which is why the end of the host is the bit to trust.

Port :8443

Which "door" on that computer. Usually hidden because https always uses door 443.

Path /games/board

Which page or thing you want, a bit like folders.

Query ?sort=price&page=2

Extra settings, as name=value pairs joined by &. They're sent to the server and often end up in its logs.

Fragment #reviews

A bookmark inside the page. Here's the clever bit: the fragment is never sent to the server. Your browser keeps it to itself. Secret-note sites use this trick to keep the decryption key in the link without the server ever seeing it.