Use of dot ( . ) after www. in the URL

Question

I often visit a link! But i have no idea what dot (.) represents in the URL.
What is use of dot (.) in the URL?

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

5

The dot (.) is the character that was defined to be the delimiter in domain names (see DNS).

It delimits the labels in a domain name.

The domain name www.google.com consists of three labels:

com (aka. the top-level domain)
google (aka. the second-level domain)
www (aka. the third-level domain, or subdomain)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

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answered Feb 13 '16 at 14:48

unor

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Agreed. To add to this it is similar to your mailing address at home. It starts with the most specific then goes to the most general (i.e. your name, followed by your street address, followed by your city, then state/province, then country). In a URL the dot represents each level from most specific to least specific similar to how a space, comma, or new line works in your mailing address. – kojow7 Feb 13 '16 at 15:09

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '16 at 15:12

The '.' is like a character which differentiates from the domains. like www.todaysfuture.in the '.' after www means the first domain is done. then it checks the next domain.

The best example is like your email ID first is the email-ID then is the '@' that means the account name is done then comes gmail/yahoo/wtvr then a '.' to finish the account type then '.' com or in depending on the account

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 13 '16 at 15:18

Web addresses, or Uniform Resource Locators, go backwards with more specific terms coming first (like real addresses).

So for www.google.com

com is the top level domain - it might be a global domain like .com or a country code like .uk, and some top level domains have sub divisions like .gov.uk and .co.uk.
google is the domain - this is the name you actually buy and route to your servers/services
www subdomain - these are optional, and can be used to distinguish different services running on the same server, so www.google.com would serve web pages while ftp.google.com might be an FTP service.

Note that the subdomain is often optional - google.com and most other servers will assume www as the default service or infer it from the protocol (the http:// bit).

Use of dot ( . ) after www. in the URL

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