Net Q & A

Question of the Month: September 2000

Answer

A domain name is part of an Internet address. For example, ford.com, yale.edu, epa.gov, army.mil, chesslinks.org. 

The three letter extensions in this example are "top level domains." There are many other top level domains (most of them two letters, for countries, like .de for Germany, .fr for France, all the way to the more obscure countries like .to for Tonga).  The part immediately to the left of the top level domain identifies a particular site within that top level domain.

The key element to stress is that the domain name is only part of the address. A URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, is a complete Internet address. It must include information to the left of the domain name, identifying the correct Internet protocol. For example, here are some common protocol identifiers: http://, ftp://, news: and mail:. 

For example, the domain name for this web site is: 

netlawtools.com

The URL for this web site is:

http://www.netlawtools.com

For example, the file on this computer that contains an article entitled "The Language of Change" is at the URL:

http://www.netlawtools.com/articles/langchange.htm 

To organize the files at this site, I created a directory entitled articles. The file name for the article is langchange.htm.

Increasingly, if you type in www.netlawtools.com, modern browsers will guess that you want http://www.netlawtools.com. This is a time-saving convenience, but it is important to understand that the correct form of the URL is longer, and that not all web sites include www as part of their address. Some might be in the form http://home.netlawtools.com, http://law.netlawtools.com, or even just http://netlawtools.com.

Why should lawyers care about the differences between domain names and URLs? 

In today's increasingly wired world, more and more clients want lawyers who understand the practical ins and outs of technology. Lawyers who stumble over such simple issues have less credibility in what is becoming a particularly lucrative segment of the legal market.

Lawyers need to understand technology in order to make it work for them. Understanding URLs gives a lawyer doing research on the Internet a giant advantage. 

Marketing provides some other examples: if you include a complete URL in an e-mail message, (like http://www.lawfirm.com) modern software will highlight it so that it the recipient sees it as a "clickable" hypertext link. This does not happen if you include merely the domain name, lawfirm.com.

I recently experienced this phenomenon. I received not one but two e-mail requests from a company that markets to lawyers that I build a link to their web site. I read and evaluate all such requests, but am selective about the links I add. One of the reasons I decided not to add a link to their site was that they failed to include a URL in either message. All they included was the domain name. I did go through the extra work to manually load my browser and type in their URL, but their ignorance caused me to lack faith in them from the beginning. 

Even e-mail addresses have a prescribed URL format. If your address is jones@lawfirm.com, spell it out with mailto: at the beginning and it too will become a hypertext link, like this: mailto:jones@lawfirm.com. When someone using modern software clicks on this, it will start a new e-mail message, with your name in the TO block. Why would you want to do this? It's a marketing tool. A potential client, or another lawyer who might want be a referral source, might see a forwarded copy of an e-mail message you wrote, or might see one of your messages in a mailing list. Making yourself more easily accessible is smart marketing.

Jerry Lawson

This page last revised: September 4, 2000.