URL

In short: “Uniform Resource Locator” — the complete address of a resource on the web, e.g. https://emzett-digital.com/wiki/index.

In more detail: A URL is made up of several parts: scheme (https://), host/domain, optional port, path, optional query string (?key=value), and optional fragment (#section). It’s a special case of the more general URI concept, which also covers non-locatable identifiers (URN).

In Depth

Broken down using an example:

https://shop.emzett-digital.com:443/produkte/schluesselanhaenger?farbe=blau#bewertungen
└─┬──┘   └────────────┬───────────┘└┬┘└──────┬───────────────┘└────┬─────┘└────┬─────┘
Scheme        Host (incl. subdomain)  Port      Path                Query        Fragment

• Scheme: determines the protocol (HTTPS, ftp://, mailto: etc.) — determines how the rest of the URL is to be interpreted.
• Host: the domain or subdomain of the target server.
• Port: usually omitted, since 443 (HTTPS) or 80 (HTTP) are automatically assumed as defaults.
• Path: addresses a specific resource on the server.
• Query string: additional key-value pairs, often for filters, search terms, or tracking parameters.
• Fragment: processed by the browser but never sent to the server — typically a jump target within the page.

Special characters in URLs (spaces, umlauts, & within a value) have to be escaped via percent encoding (“URL encoding”), e.g. a space becomes %20 — otherwise they could be confused with the actual URL structure (the delimiters ?, &, #).

See also: Domain, HTTPS