There are a number of reasons to use a URL. While you have your link to Canvas available to you on the browser, most school Canvas pages are unlisted, meaning they can't be searched.

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Why do we care about URLs?

Each folder has various pages involved in the website. The URL is what tells the browser where to find the code in the file system to build the web page. ​

​This is how we structure web code

This tells the browser whether or not the site owner has put a security certificate called SSL on their site. Don't buy anything on a site without HTTPS!

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​Protocol/Scheme

This is a key that tells the computer how the hosting service will encrypt your data - effectively turning it into gibberish if you look at it - and so your sensitive info can't be seen easily.

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​SSL is provided by hosting services.

The domain name tells the browser where the website's file system is located. The domain name is attached to an IP address that tells the browser where the server is located, and where on the server the code can be found.

Domain Names

The IP address for quizizz.com is 172.17.0.2. It's hard to remember that. It's easy to remember quizizz.com.

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​IP addresses are hard to remember

A DNS server (Domain Name System) stores information about domain name IP addresses and sends that data back to the computer. The computer uses the IP address to look up the site.

​So how does it work?

This is the part of the domain name that indicates what kind of site you're looking at. Different TLDs have different meanings, and can be trusted differently.

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​Top Level Domains

• .gov

• .edu

• .mil

• .museum

Sponsored

• .com

• .org

• .net

Generic

Different Types of TLDs

• .ca

• .br

• .de

• .fr

• .ie

Country-Code

• .biz

• .name

• .pro

• .google

• .apple

Generic Restricted

Different Types of TLDs

Remember that file tree we looked at? The folders are called "subfolders" in the URL. The actual file name is called a "slug."

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So what's next?

Imagine you have the domain, www.ThinkLab.com. Using the file tree to the right, how do you get the site into the camping page? Well, it should look like this:
www.thinklab.com/activities/indoor/camping.html

Let's look again...

​Let's break it down. Our TLD is ".com" and our domain is "www.thinklab.com".
The first subfolder we enter is "activities," and inside that is another folder called "indoor." From there, we're navigating the file called "camping.html."

This whole URL tells the browser exactly where to find the page to load for you when you set it up.