NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System User's Guide

## Opening Documents Directly

On occasion you may want to open a document directly instead of connecting to a document through a series of hyperlinks. To do this, use the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL for short. URLs combine the protocol, name of the machine serving the file to the Internet, and the path and filename.

To open a document directly, select Open from the File menu and enter the URL in the URL To Open field that appears in the dialog box. Your cursor must be in the field in the dialog box to type.

### The URL Format

A URL consists of a reference to the type of server being accessed and, essentially, the path for the specific document. Sometimes the port number of the server is also included, and sometimes a filename is not included because a default file to open has been set in a directory. When you click on a hyperlink, NCSA Mosaic interprets the URL and retrieves the document by connecting to the Internet server that is specified in the URL. The file is then shown to you.

The required URL format is:

scheme`://`host`.`domain`[:`port`]/`path`/`filename

where scheme is one of the following:

Name
  Server Type
`file`
  your local system or an anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server
`FTP`
  an anonymous FTP server
`HTTP`
  a World Wide Web server (HTTP stands for hypertext transportprotocol)
`gopher`
  a Gopher server
`news`
  an NNTP news server
`telnet`
  opens a telnet session
`WAIS`
  a WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) server

For example, the URL for the NCSA home page is:

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/NCSAHome.html

where:

http is the type of server being run (a Web server)
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu is the Internet address of the NCSA Web server
/General is the directory containing the Home Page
NCSAHome.html is the file served to you

For more information about URLs, refer to A Beginner's Guide to URLs on the NCSA Mosaic Help menu or to the original URL information file from CERN (available as a hyperlink at the end of the Beginner's Guide).

### Displaying the URL

The cursor becomes a small hand when you have it over a hyperlink. The URL of the document under the hand pointer is shown in the information line on the Document View window. This tells you where NCSA Mosaic will go to retrieve this document.

Another way to see a the URL for a document is to open the document source file by choosing View Source... from the File menu. The Document Source window displays the coded file that is being interpreted by NCSA Mosaic (see ``HyperText Markup Language'' for more information on the coded file).