What do you call the entire first part of a URL?

jnicklas picture jnicklas · Jan 17, 2010 · Viewed 32.3k times · Source

If I have a URL like:

http://www.example.com:9090/test.html

Then I know that www.example.com is the host name, but what do you call http://www.example.com:9090? Is there some kind of established name for that?

Answer

d4nyll picture d4nyll · Jan 20, 2015

It is called the origin.


More generally speaking, here are the different parts of a URL, as per window.location. (So at least according to how Javascript calls it)

protocol://username:password@hostname:port/pathname?search#hash
-----------------------------href------------------------------
                             -----host----
-----------      origin      -------------
  • protocol - protocol scheme of the URL, including the final ':'
  • hostname - domain name
  • port - port number
  • pathname - /pathname
  • search - ?parameters
  • hash - #fragment_identifier
  • username - username specified before the domain name
  • password - password specified before the domain name
  • href - the entire URL
  • origin - protocol://hostname:port
  • host - hostname:port

Formal definition is in RFC 6454 section 4.