The letters to the left of the :// specify
the protocol.
http is hypertext transfer
protocol .
This might also be gopher, telnet, ftp, ...
Just some syntax to separate the protocol (on the
left) from the host (on the right).
The part of the URL to the right of the ://
that is composed of letter groups (or sometimes numbers) separated by
dots is the name of the computer. In more technical terms, it is the
domain name for the host (the numbers would be the IP
address). The highest level domain in this case is edu. Some
examples of high level domains are fr - France, de -
Germany, gov - government, org - organization,
com - commercial, edu - educational
This is simply a DOS-like path structure. It
specifies the name of all the sub-directories in the path to the HTML
file. The server specifies which directory
is considered the root directory and this may or may not be the
real root directory; the default directory is the current
one.
At FGCU course pages with instructional materials are located on the
file server ruby, in a directory called courses, in a subdirectory
with the instructor's name, in a subdirectory with the course CRN
number.
This specifies the name of the HTML file that the
client renders into the page. Usually, if no HTML file is specified,
the server will either send one that has been declared the default
page or the server will produce an index of the files in that
directory. Allowing a default page to be served offers a little more
security.
At FGCU, if a file named "index.html" exists, it
will be displayed as the default.