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This is intended to be an in-depth discussion on the Domain Name System (DNS), and there are several areas that are going to continue to be addressed and expanded upon, so do bookmark this page and come back often.

When you see a billboard or television ad which is designed to bring you to a particular website, you are being given what is referred to as an URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. It is most common to look at it as an address much like the address your home or apartment has and is in fact, rather analogous to a physical postal address in most respects.

What you will see or be verbally directed toward is an address (URL) like one of the following:

www.biztld.net or http://www.biztld.net or biztld.net or http://biztld.net

Let's take these examples one at a time and refer to them as 1 through 4, respectively.

First of all, the complete address for the website in question is example 2, which we will break down into it's various components.

http:// = the type of protocol that we are going to be communicating when we get to this address. Let's say that you sent a letter to Russia and prefaced it as such:

Cyrillic://Anatoly.Berensky.Apartment07.Section39.
Kremlin.Moscow.Russia.

Now, if you'll notice, the protocol says that we need to use the Cyrillic Alphabet as our protocol for communications if we expect to be understood by Anotoly, who lives somewhere in the Kremlin. Also, note that with the address portion actually starts after the //'s (Pronounced "whack-whack" in Unix—not to be confused with "double back-whack").

Another thing that we can say about the property of this address is that the further left we move in the address, two things are occurring — we are being told something that is both more specific while at the same time less inclusive. "Anotoly" is not very specific with regards to whom we are trying to reach and yet certainly, there are very few people that are named Anatoly whose last names are Berensky who live in apartment number 7 of section 39 at the Kremlin in Moscow. This level of exclusivity is reversed the further we look toward the right of the address.

For example, Russia is a big place. If you were to lick the stamp on an envelope labeled Cyrillic://Russia., who do you suppose that the letter would be delivered to? This is the less specific, and more inclusive side of the equation. You may ask yourself why bother with something so vague, but just suppose what would happen if you addressed you letter as Cyrillic://Anatoly.Berensky.Russia ? I'm sure you can appreciate how many people with this name might be in a nation the size of Russia.

Now, for that big period that trails of the end of Russia. We call this "root". It is expressed as "." in notation and of all the "www." places you've been asked to visit in the past you have never seen it printed. That is because it is assumed to always be part of the address and therefore isn't printed out. What is root? Well, in our little Cyrillic protocol example here you could think of it as "WORLD", or "MOTHER EARTH". That certainly is the root of all oceans and continents and any addressing system that you would use to address a label on a package with the intent of having it arrive. No, you don't need to put "MOTHER EARTH" on the label, because people, in automatically assuming that the delivery point is somewhere on earth (At least in this century) would think you were really silly to state such an obvious thing.

Now let's move on...

There is a period (dot, as everyone likes to call it) at the end of every URL that you type in to connect to a site on the Internet. It stands for ROOOOOT. But since all of the machines on the internet are somehow magically aware of the existence of this "root" and where it is, you never enter that final period that includes all addresses everywhere (Less Specific and More Inclusive — don't forget that analogy, it will carry you far). For now let's just assume that every machine has an instinctively universal understanding of this root thing. Okay?

If Cyrillic:// means we will use a certain alphabet to communicate as a matter of protocol, so does http://. This stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP, for short). What that means is that the protocol we will use to send and receive packets from the address following the whack whacks is the hypertext transfer protocol, or, Web based as they are rather synonymously intertwined in common understanding.

The web is really only a rather modest portion of the Internet, and other various private networks that traverse it, and there are several other protocols worth mentioning here. A short list would be some of the following, and we'll list them like you would see them in your browser, commonly called a web browser, or HTML browser (hold on we're getting to that HTML thing).

http:// = Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Traditionally and historically it's origins centered on a language (alphabet, if that is more comfortable for you to understand) called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

ftp:// = File Transfer Protocol. Although this is but another entire topic, it is heavily laced within the functioning of the Internet and browsers and governs the way people have traditionally given (to Upload) and gotten (to Download) files over the years.

Gopher:// = Well, once a very populated and cherished system of research and retrieval, gopher servers have long since been displace for the most part by the http protocol.

File:// = you're looking at files on your local hard drive or mapped network drive.

There are many other protocols as well, but it's time to move on now by taking a closer look at example 2 from above.

http://www.biztld.net

I think we can all agree that since we know now what the http:// means, with the mere explanation that your browser by default assumes that if you fail to enter a protocol on the address line for the URL, hypertext transfer protocol is assumed. That would make the same address look like this.

www.biztld.net

So, you only need to specify the actual address of the URL if it's going to be web based. And as we said before, people would think you were weird if you put in that trailing period which symbolizes the root. What we're left with now is a host name. In fact, what you're looking at above is known as a "Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), because it includes what will soon be apparent to you as the hostname, or host portion, and the domain name, or domain portion of the FQDN.

Earlier, we were combining names like "Anatoly" with places like Kremlin.Russia. This is no different. Here, we have a name like www, combined with a place like biztld.net. And it's all arranged very neatly within the Domain Name space under the confines of "Root".

The big misnomer that I want to point out here, is that many people think that www stands for some kind of signal that they're going to communicate with a web server. In fact, www means nothing more than the moniker someone assigned to the machine as its name. We could have named our machine josephine.biztld.net and you could type out the whole http://josephine.biztld.net to get to our servers. But the reason most people use www is because it follows a convention that is easy to remember and also guess in the blink of an eye. What's the web site address for IBM? www.ibm.com would be a good guess indeed. And NASA's website? www.nasa.gov it is. So you see, the general understanding that a website's hostname will be www for the most publicly accessible sites along with the assumption that many browsers are often programmed to make by prepending a www before a domain name (some browsers would prepend biztld.net with an http://www if you didn't type the whole thing out). All of the other dots just serve to separate the various components of names and domain space so that it doesn't run together any more than it already does.

[Domain Names 101 Chapter 2 coming soon.]

Questions? Sure!   contact@biztld.net

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