a way of specifying the location of publicly available information on the Internet, in the form
protocol://machine:port number/filename
Often the port number and/or the filename is unnecessary. For example,
https://csam.uga.edu:80
means connect to port 80 of csam.uga.edu using Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and
ftp://ai.uga.edu/pub/natural.language/Contents
means to download a particular file from ai.uga.edu by File Transfer Protocol. A user name and password can be included thus:
ftp://username:password@www.somewhere.com/directoryname/filename
This is a handy way to access your web site on its server from your browser. See FTP.
The URL for a World Wide Web site often includes www, as in https://www.spu.edu. Other possible protocols include gopher and telnet.
