Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Absolute URLs

An absolute URL is made up of the following components: a protocol identifier, a hostname (the name of the server machine), and the path to the specific filename. When you are linking to documents on other servers, you need to use an absolute URL. The following is an example of a link with an absolute URL:

<a href="http://www.littlechair.com/web/index.html">...</a>

Here, the protocol is identified as http (HyperText Transfer Protocol, the standard protocol of the Web), the host is www.littlechair.com, and the pathname is web/index.html.