INTERNET BASICS URL -RFC1630 AND RFC1738

Internet is not limited to just google orkut or some popular websites. Numerous other applications of internet are there. I will say that internet is unlimited. Today I will discuss various technologies of Internet. If you do a search of this topic on wikibooks you will fine a very large source of the topics discussed there. And to read every topic is a very daunting task. And therefore I have made a compact summary of the articles but IF you have so much time to read the whole of article(it spans more than 100 pages then you can go here)

URL
Now all of us know what is URL(uniform resource locator). well it is different from IP address in some respects. IP address is the address of a specific computer(or server) connected to address. This dose not mean that every IP address has an associated URL with it. For example have you ever seen your computer's IP ? check it out at www.tellmyip.com now if you enter this URL in the address bar the browser will redirect you to your own router through which you connect to the web. Now have you every seen your computer's URL address. Probably never. So that's the difference.

From the early stages of the internet there (I will write a post on that topic later) the importance of URL was felt. It was very necessity. Well the first RFC(Request for Comments) I could trace back was RFC 1630 . You can have a look of it here. A GREAT DEAL OF INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND OUT AFTER READING THIS RFC. This RFC describes various definations for URL, URI(Uniform resource identifier) and URN(unifrom resource name) and their standerds. Well while reading the whole RFC is a daunting task I have added a short summary of various informative sources from this RFC.
This RFC describes the URI structure and was published in 1994
See this one

Example 1

   The URIs

                http://info.cern.ch/albert/bertram/marie-claude

   and

                http://info.cern.ch/albert/bertram/marie%2Dclaude

   are identical, as the %2D encodes a hyphen character.

   Example 2

   The URIs

                http://info.cern.ch/albert/bertram/marie-claude

   and

                http://info.cern.ch/albert/bertram%2Fmarie-claude

   are NOT identical, as in the second case the encoded slash does not
   have hierarchical significance.

   Example 3

   The URIs

                fxqn:/us/va/reston/cnri/ietf/24/asdf%*.fred

   and

                news:12345667123%asdghfh@info.cern.ch

   are illegal, as all % characters imply encodings, and there is no
   decoding defined for "%*"  or "%as" in this recommendation.

You can refer the whole RFC for more info.

Well the next development was made with the release of RFC1738 in december 1994.
I will list the important info I could find out there for full RFC go here.

  In general, URLs are written as follows:

       :

   A URL contains the name of the scheme being used () followed
   by a colon and then a string (the ) whose
   interpretation depends on the scheme.

The general schema of an HTTP URL is
http://:/?

where HOST=WEBSITE HOST OR NAME
  PORT=PORT THROUGH WHICH YOU ARE CONNECTING WITH THE SITE(80 FOR HTTP)
  PATH=THE BASIC PATH
  SEARCHPART=SPECIAL ATTRIBUTE

YOU CAN REFER THE WHOLE RFC FOR LIST OF THE FOLLOWING SCHEMAS
ftp                     File Transfer protocol
http                    Hypertext Transfer Protocol
gopher                  The Gopher protocol
mailto                  Electronic mail address
news                    USENET news
nntp                    USENET news using NNTP access
telnet                  Reference to interactive sessions
wais                    Wide Area Information Servers
file                    Host-specific file names
prospero                Prospero Directory Service