Today's letter in the networking ABC's is the letter "U".  UDP, UIE, and users are popular words for this letter, but I opted to a word that most folks use every day but don't necessarily know it.  If you open a browser and connect to a website, you are making use of the word URL.

"U" is for URL

URL

Pronounced: yōō'är-ěl'

URL, or Uniform Resource Locator (or also known as Universal Resource Locator) is, in popular usage, a synonym for Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).  A URL begins with a scheme name that defines it's namespace, purpose, and the syntax of the remaining part of the URL.  Most web-enabled programs will try to dereference a URL according to the semantics of it's scheme. In it's current strict technical meaning, a URL is a URI that "in addition to identifying a resource, provides a means of locating the resource by describing it's primary access mechanism (ie, it's network location).  An example of a URL is http://devcentral.f5.com/docs with "http" being the protocol, "DevCentral.f5.com" being the host that serves the resource, and "/docs" being the resource on the host.