What is the difference between a URI, URN and a URL ?
July 25, 2022
In this article, you'll see what's the difference between a URI, URN and a URL with examples and illustrations.
Illustration showing the structure and the role of the URL, URN and the URI. Credits : Daniel Miessler
The difference between these and examples
In this article, I'll tell you what's the difference between these three. But first, let's begin with the difference between a URL and a URI.
The difference between a URI and a URL is that a URI can be just a name by itself, or a name with a protocol that tells you how to reach it — which is a URL.
You may be wondering; what does that mean. Well, without an example it won't be simple to understand. So here are some :
google.com
It's only a URI as it has only the name of the resource without the used protocol (or the way to reach there).
Whereas;
https://google.com
is a URL because there are the name of the resource (google.com), and the protocol used (https://)
URIs, URNs and URLs
In this part, I'll tell what are these and I'll help you to figure them out with a summary table.
- A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or simply address, is a type of URI that specifies not only a resource, but how to reach it on the internet by specifying the used protocol such as http://, ftp://, or mailto://. It's basically the kind of text we have to deal with everyday.
- A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a string of characters that uniquely identify a name or a resource on the internet. A URI identifies a resource by name, location, or both. URIs have two specializations known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and Uniform Resource Name (URN).
- A Uniform Resource Name (URN) is a type of URI that uses the specific naming scheme of urn: ; we can find it on ISBNs and more.
Here is a summary table :