Difference Between “URL” and “URI”

Some of us (including me) can’t differentiate between URL and URI. We are often using URL and URI. So that’s why I search on internet and find some useful information. And I thought that I should share it with u. Any suggestions and comments are appreciated

URI – Uniform Resource Identifier

URL – Uniform Resource Locator

 URI

A URI identifies a resource either by location, or a name, or both. More often than not, most of us use URIs that defines a location to a resource. The fact that a URI can identify resources by both name and location has lead to a lot of the confusion in my opinion. A URI has two specializations known as URL and URN.

URL

A URL is a specialization of URI that defines the network location of a specific resource. Unlike a URN, the URL defines how the resource can be obtained. We use URLs every day in the form of http://damnhandy.com, etc. But a URL doesn’t have to be an HTTP URL, it can be ftp://damnhandy.com, smb://damnhandy.com, etc.

 Difference:

A URI is an identifier for some resource, but a URL gives you specific information as to obtain that resource. It is now considered incorrect to use URL when describing applications. Generally, if the URL describes both the location and name of a resource, the term to use is URI. Since this is generally the case most of us encounter every day, URI is the correct term.