Address—Uniform Resource Locator, text X[X(1099)]

Guide for use:

The following rules are to assist in data exchange and should not be considered as a standard for the creation of web addresses.

A web address cannot have any white space.

A web address is a uniform resource locator and consists of 2 parts; a scheme and the web address path.

Scheme
A scheme is the type of connection protocol that the URL is going to adhere to. The most commonly used on the internet is http. This is always followed by a colon and double backslash ‘://’. It is not compulsory for an entity to provide the scheme information as it is commonly assumed that http:// is the scheme used. But if provided it should be included in this data element as it could vary from the http value.

Web Address Path
Following the scheme, the URL can consist of various types of information from Domain Names, Sub-Domain Names, File Names, IP addresses, Top Level Domain Names and various symbols/special characters such as ‘:’,‘&’,’$’,’#’,’?’ or ’/’. These may all be valid and if provided by the client should be included in this data element.

Most times the client will simply provide a scheme and a domain name, e.g. http://www.domainname.com, or even just the domain name, e.g. www.domainname.com.

This being the case a majority of the time it is still important to understand that a URL can come in various formats and should not be dismissed if it looks incorrect, e.g.

https://username:password@subdomain.domain.com:port/
directory/file.txt?parameter=value is a valid URL address.

Origin:
Standards Australia 2006. AS 4590—2006 Interchange of client information. Sydney: Standards Australia.