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

Question

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

Answer 1

RFC 3986 details the syntax components. The part you refer to would be the scheme (http) and authority (www.example.com:9090).

Answer 2

You can read about every part of URL on Wikipedia. You'll find there that http is a protocol name, :9090 determines that the connection should be establishment on port #9090 etc.

Answer 3

It is called the origin.

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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.

Answer 4

FWIW, the .Net framework Uri class goes for "GetLeftPart()". It's irritating not having a proper name for "scheme + authority"

Answer 5

I don't think so. If there was, I would expect the DOM to reflect this in the window.location class: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM/Window.location

Answer 6

I don't know the name for when it has the scheme, but the hostname with the port is collectively known as the Authority. A nice explanation here.