URI and URL : Uniform resource locator and Uniform Resource Identifier

URI and URL are often interchangeably used. However, technically there are some differences between Uniform resource locator and Uniform Resource Identifier. In this article, we will briefly discuss on both URI and URL.

URI or Uniform Resource Identifiers

URI or Uniform Resource Identifiers is basically the broader terminology to cover other conceptual models operated on the information space. Internet is better avoided in this conceptual model.

In WikiPedia you will see to make others understand what is URI, they have used a capsule like diagram to explain URI. It is a matter of fact, URI can not be divided in that way. URI has many subs, these are concepts behind URI. Among these there are four majors – URL, URN, PURL and URC.

Examples of URI concepts and structures

There are big books only on URI itself. Many components of URI are still under pending phase. We are giving few typical examples of URI concepts and structures.

• http:
• ftp:
• tel:
• git:
• mailto:
• isbn:

As you can see there are Internet related as well as non Internet related things included under URI. This is why in this article to complete the whole concept, along with URI we have discussing on URL too.  So URI is Scheme specific part of our next topic – URL

What is URL then ?

We have given some examples of few schemes of URI. http is a protocol which is a URI scheme. But the example of a typical URL will be :

https://thecustomizewindows.com/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/screenshot.png

URL is an important component of many protocols of the Internet, including http: ; ftp: ; mailto: and so on. It is a matter of fact, the file  screenshot.png in above example can be fetched by :

sftp://myusername@myip/www.thecustomizewindows.com/web/content/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/screenshot.png

or in this way without  URI part :

/www.thecustomizewindows.com/web/content/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/screenshot.png

Or more simple :

/themes/twentyeleven/screenshot.png

This is how we use inside a theme’s CSS file!

Importance of URI and URL

URI scheme is not needed for internal usage just like your do not shout at your home to call your father as Mr. Robert Ray. You can simply shout, “where are you, my father?” to locate him. Officially you need to say, I am finding Mr. Robert Ray, my Father. Mr. part is URI scheme in this case. So, its a god practice to avoid saying URI, where your want actually the publicly available path, that contains the URI scheme and URL as a whole. URL of this web page, for example is :

https://thecustomizewindows.com/2012/02/uri-and-url-uniform-resource-locator-and-uniform-resource-identifier/