Yes, tsuwm, I agree that both
link and
hyperlink are synonymous. As with many dahilian requests, I am sure he'll choose to ignore this, but here goes. There's something called a
URL (uniform resource locator). You can think of it as an address (or locator) to something (or resource) on the Net (not just the Web). It has several parts:
1. The protocol (nope, Dahil, not the cabal of good old boys in cahoots with Bill Gates, but the
http part). There are other protocols: e.g., file, ftp, https.
Then comes a colon (:) and a couple of forward slashes (//).
2. The domain, that's the www period domainname period tld part: this is part of the stuff that holds the Net together and predates the web. The TLD (top level domain) is the edu for a university, com for a commercial business, etc part; the domain is like wordsmith in wordsmith.org; and, anything to the left of that one or more separated by periods is some specific machine within the domain.
Then comes a forward slash.
3. Everything after the domain name and before the question mark (?) is a path that organizes resources on the particular machine (or host) specified in the domain name part of things.
After the ?
4. There's a complicated syntax, but anything after the ? is basically data being passed to a CGI program specified by the URL. (Actually, there's also a # sign sometimes in there and that means a particular anchor within a HTML document that the URL points at. No, it's not a sublink, because no part of a URL is a link.)
Again, please note that a URL is
not the same thing as a (hyper)link. The HTTP protocol (that final protocol is pleonastic and upsets some but not others) uses something called HTML to mark up text and images into a web page. There's an a element that uses a URL as an attribute. The a element gets interpreted by the web client (your browser) so that the text it surrounds is underlined and made blue (or purple after it's been visited) by default. That's the hyperlink. Again a hyperlink and a URL are not the same thing. If you really want to learn more about this I can post some links to RFC (the standards docs that define what the web is).
