Internet and Its Uses · 4 question types
Past paper frequency (2018 to 2024)
This topic accounts for approximately 3% of your exam marks.
The difference between the internet and the WWW, and cookie/browser functions, are typical questions.
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the text-based address of a specific resource on the web.
A URL is built from three main parts, in a fixed order:
protocol://domain-name/file-path
Example — Break down the URL https://shop.example.org/books/computer-science.html.
| Part | The value | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol | https | The set of rules used to communicate between the browser and the web server. https means HTTP with encryption; http is the unencrypted version. The browser uses this to know which protocol to speak |
| Domain name | shop.example.org | The name of the web server that hosts the resource. The browser passes this to a DNS server (covered in section 4), which converts it into an IP address the network can route to |
| File path | /books/computer-science.html | The specific location of the resource on the server. This tells the server which page or file to send back. A path of / means "the home page" |
Some URLs also include optional extras after the path:
?): extra parameters, often the result of a search or a form, e.g. ?q=computer+science.#): a specific section within the page, e.g. #section3.Both are beyond the strict syllabus requirement but worth recognising.
Computers route requests using IP addresses like 82.165.83.156. Numeric addresses are short for computers but impossible for humans to remember. A URL is the human-readable version: easy to type, easy to recognise, easy to share. The DNS (next section) does the work of translating between the two.