| Email Addresses & URLs |
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The first part of the address indicates the user name of the person you are trying to reach. The user name might be a first name, last name, or combination of both. It might also be a nickname or any other name that the user selected or was assigned when he signed up for e-mail. The @ symbol in the address is simply used to separate the user name from the rest of the address. Don't try to skip it though, as it is a necessary part of the address. After the @ symbol, you will find the name of the domain, which indicates the network where the user is located. The domain can be considered the place that the user's mail is received. The extension following the domain indicates the type of organization involved. Some common extensions are:
You might also see foreign addresses that add a country code as the last several digits of the address, such as:
As you know, with the popularity of cell phones and the additional number of phones lines being installed in homes, many new area codes have been added to accommodate the growing number of telephone numbers. The same thing is already happening to Internet addresses. Many new domains are being added to support all the new Internet users. Recently seven new domains were created, and more are expected to follow in the not too distant future. First and foremost in the e-mail addressing world is to remember that you must type the e-mail address exactly. Even if one digit is wrong, it will be returned to you. Also, there are no spaces in Internet addresses. Using spaces is a common error, easily corrected. Web page addresses are slightly different. A Web page address is also called a Uniform Resource Locator or URL. A typical URL would look like this: or http://www.compukiss.com The first part of the address, the part before the colon, is the access method. Most of the time when you see "http," you are accessing a Web page. Colons and slashes are special separators that the computer understands. They are UNIX codes because most computers use the UNIX operating system to access the Internet. For those of you familiar with DOS, you will find that DOS uses the backslash (\) while Internet addresses use the forward slash (/). After the slashes, you will see an indicator such as www. This stands for World Wide Web. Next comes the name of the computer where the information is located. Every now and then, you will see an address that does not contain www. This is not necessarily a mistake. Although most Internet addresses include a www, a Web page can reside on the part of the Internet that is not found on the World Wide Web. When you are looking for a Web page, you can sometimes guess the correct address if you understand how addresses are formed. For example, if you want to find the Ford Motor Company, you would probably guess its address to be http://www.ford.com. If you enter that address in Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, you do not have to enter the http://. You would simply enter www.ford.com. Actually, Netscape Navigator seems to be a little better at guessing addresses than Internet Explorer. In Navigator, you enter just "ford," and it would take you to the correct page. Be aware, however, that the three letters after the period can make a big difference. For instance, www.whitehouse.gov will take you to the official White House governmental Web site, but using the same address with .com instead of .gov will take you to an online TV station. For many years, www.whitehouse.com actually took you to a pornographic Web site. The Internet is a treasure chest of information. As a user, you must have a key to unlock this high tech chest. E-mail addresses and URLs are the keys. The quicker you master an understanding of both, the quicker you can open that chest and begin enjoying the riches of the Internet.
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