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Is there a name for the portion of a URL that follows the scheme? If not for URLs in general, I'm interested in the name for this portion of HTTP and HTTPS URLs.

For example, what is the term for the entire portion labeled C here, optionally including B?

AAAAABBCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
http://company.com/path/to/file

I understand that there are names for subsets of this portion, such as host, port, and path.

The Wikipedia page for URI uses the term "path" to refer to the entire portion of a URI following several schemes, but for the HTTP and HTTPS schemes, the "path" is not this entire portion.

The BNF given for URIs in the URI specification defines the B and C portion together in a production called hier-part, which the text seems to refer to as a "hierarchical sequence of components." hier-part excludes the query and fragment (hash) portions, which would be fine for my purposes.

I'm asking so that I'm not unnecessarily inventing a name for a specification I'm writing.

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Joe Lapp
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    You already accepted an answer, but maybe it helps you still: I found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30580562/what-is-the-difference-between-resource-and-endpoint helpful, but I have my [RESTful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) glasses on. – B--rian Aug 22 '19 at 15:32
  • Thank you @B--rian. Reading that SO answer now, I'm thinking that the term "resource" identifies this substring of the URL in the context of REST, but I'm not sure how clearly the term would refer to this substring in another context. – Joe Lapp Aug 22 '19 at 21:23

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In case it’s a reference (i.e., a link or similar),

//example.com/path?query#fragment

is called a network-path reference (section 4.2), also known as protocol-relative URL.

The URI standard doesn’t define a term for it if it’s not a reference (and neither for the variant without //).

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unor
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  • Excellent! Thank you! The clues were there in the BNF and I missed them! I'm also seeing them called "relative references." Apparently they were formerly called "relative URIs" or "relative URLs" (per section 1.2.3). – Joe Lapp Aug 12 '19 at 19:45