Domain Name

Domain names have an important role in Internet traffic. They provide a straightforward basis for contact with computers, websites and electronic mailboxes belonging to companies, other organizations and private individuals. Using a domain name, an Internet user can, for example, find the site belonging to a company and thus obtain information, view the company's catalogue, place an advertisement, perform a financial transaction, place an order or whatever. In short, domain names make the Internet usable for humans <g>.

Domain names are derived from the unique numbers that all computers on the Internet have. These numbers are known as IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and consist of figures only. Unfortunately, long numbers aren't very easy to remember, so it was decided to use a system whereby you can have a name that corresponds to an IP address. The Internet uses what are known as domain name servers to look up the numbers (IP addresses) that these names correspond to. Every domain name is made up of at least two elements. The last element of the name is called the top-level domain∞. Country code top-level domain names refer to countries; so, for example, there is .nl for the Netherlands, .be for Belgium and .de for Germany (Deutschland).

Not all top-level domain names relate to countries, however. The most commonly seen top-level domains∞ were agreed upon as an aid to identify the type of site you were going to visit. These include .com for commercial, .org for organization, .edu for educational, .net for network, .gov for government. Recent additions include .info for informational and .biz for business. However, it must be noted that spammers and hucksters have managed to further muddy the waters that these 'identifying' names were supposed to represent.

The item in front of the top-level domain name is usually the company/personal/entity name of the folks behind the web-site.

The www: in front of all of this is also (mostly) a convenience, letting the user know that this is a web site normally accessed via a web-browser using HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) .. You may also see "ftp:∞" (File Transfer Protocol) or "news:" (Network News Transfer Protocol∞ or NNTP)
Items seen between the first "protocol" bit and the company/personal/entity name is basically there to guide to to a certain/specific area that is hosted by the folks behind the name. Items seen after the top-level Domain name (separated by a "/") will take you to a specific web-page on that hosted web-site.

http://forum.spamcop.net/scwik/DomainName
.. | ........ | ...... | .... | .... | ........ |-> this page
.. | ........ | ...... | .... | .... |-> this folder/directory/application
.. | ........ | ...... | .... |-> top-level Domain type/category
.. | ........ | ...... |-> SpamCop.net Domain
.. | ........ |-> sub-Domain of SpamCop.net
.. |-> protocol used for connection

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