But that hasn’t stopped people from using “URL”, has it? Nope. In 2001 the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) recommended just using “URI”, and to stop using URL and URN. For example, the 2016 edition of Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats has a 10-digit ISBN of 0241257530 and a URN of urn:isbn:0241257530. Books are identified in the namespace isbn which refers to the book’s International Standard Book Number. URNs, use namespaces to identify the type of the URN. It can uniquely identify an instance of a document, for instance, even if there are many copies on the web.īut what if one wants to just identify a thing for which there may be many copies without specifying a particular one? That’s where the URN or Uniform Resource Name comes in. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator and is familiar to all web users.Ī URL is a URL because it tells a web browser, or perhaps some other tool, where something is located. Specifically, it is a type of URI called a URL. The Wikipedia entry I linked above does a great job of describing URIs, and the link itself is a URI. The mechanism is designed to be extensible and uses human-readable characters. It is a way to uniquely identify something. Clear? No? OK, we’ll look at these in more detail and Try to clear up some of the conflict?Ī URI us a “ Uniform Resource Identifier”. A URL is a URI, and so is a URN, but a URL isn’t a URN and not all URIs are URLs.