The US National Academies Press ( NAP ) was created to publish the reports issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine , the National Academy of Engineering , the National Academy of Medicine , and the National Research Council . It publishes nearly 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in the sciences. The NAP's stated mission is seemingly self-contradictory: to disseminate as widely as possible the works of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and to be financially self-sustaining through sales. This mission has led to great experimentation in openness regarding online publishing.
23-491: The National Academy Press, as it was known in 1993, was the first self-sustaining publisher to make its material available on the Web, for free, in an open access model. By 1997, 1000 reports were available as sequential page images (starting with i, then ii, then iii, then iv...), with a minimal navigational envelope. Their experience up to 1998 was already indicating that open access led to increased sales, at least with page images as
46-464: A favicon (a small icon that represents the website), a small icon may be present within the address bar, a generic icon appearing if the website does not specify one. The address bar is also used to show the security status of a web page; various designs are used to distinguish between insecure HTTP and encrypted HTTPS , alongside use of an Extended Validation Certificate , which some websites use to verify their identity. Most web browsers allow for
69-473: A secure connection to the website . Internet users are distributed throughout the world using a wide variety of languages and alphabets, and expect to be able to create URLs in their own local alphabets. An Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is a form of URL that includes Unicode characters. All modern browsers support IRIs. The parts of the URL requiring special treatment for different alphabets are
92-517: A double slash ( // ). Berners-Lee later expressed regret at the use of dots to separate the parts of the domain name within URIs , wishing he had used slashes throughout, and also said that, given the colon following the first component of a URI, the two slashes before the domain name were unnecessary. Early WorldWideWeb collaborators including Berners-Lee originally proposed the use of UDIs: Universal Document Identifiers. An early (1993) draft of
115-437: Is empty if it has no characters; the scheme component is always non-empty. The authority component consists of subcomponents : This is represented in a syntax diagram as: [REDACTED] The URI comprises: A web browser will usually dereference a URL by performing an HTTP request to the specified host, by default on port number 80. URLs using the https scheme require that requests and responses be made over
138-587: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as an outcome of collaboration started at the IETF Living Documents birds of a feather session in 1992. The format combines the pre-existing system of domain names (created in 1985) with file path syntax, where slashes are used to separate directory and filenames . Conventions already existed where server names could be prefixed to complete file paths, preceded by
161-517: The Web , is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages ( HTTP / HTTPS ) but are also used for file transfer ( FTP ), email ( mailto ), database access ( JDBC ), and many other applications. Most web browsers display
184-474: The HTML Specification referred to "Universal" Resource Locators. This was dropped some time between June 1994 ( RFC 1630 ) and October 1994 (draft-ietf-uri-url-08.txt). In his book Weaving the Web , Berners-Lee emphasizes his preference for the original inclusion of "universal" in the expansion rather than the word "uniform", to which it was later changed, and he gives a brief account of
207-567: The NAP announced that it would provide the full text of all of the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as free PDF downloads. By March 28, 2018, 10,000 books were freely available online and for download. By the end of 2022, 19 million PDFs had been downloaded since all reports were made available for free. URL A uniform resource locator ( URL ), colloquially known as an address on
230-605: The NAP published the results of an online experiment to determine the "cannibalization effect" that might occur if the NAP gave all reports away online in PDF format. Developed as a Mellon-funded grant, and working with the University of Maryland Business School , the experiment interrupted buyers just before finalizing an online order, with an opportunity to acquire the work in PDF for a randomly generated discount: 50%, 10%, 100%, 70% off
253-656: The Openbook to first enable better external findability (making the HTML page for the first page image of every chapter include the first 10 and last 10 pages of OCRed ASCII text of the chapter, to produce a robustly indexable first chapter page), as well as exploring the boundaries of knowledge discovery and exploration, implementing "Related Titles" in 2001, the "Find More Like This Chapter" in 2002, "Chapter Skim" in 2003, "Search Builder" and "Reference Finder" in 2004, and "Active Skim" and enhanced "Search Builder" in 2005. In 2003,
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#1732771951842276-558: The URL of a web page above the page in an address bar . A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html , which indicates a protocol ( http ), a hostname ( www.example.com ), and a file name ( index.html ). Uniform Resource Locators were defined in RFC 1738 in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the World Wide Web , and the URI working group of
299-459: The address bar to navigate directly to the Misplaced Pages article for cake . This feature is standardised for users of the search engine DuckDuckGo as "bangs". Web browsers often include a feature called Smart Bookmarks . In this feature, the user sets a command that allows for a function (such as searching, editing, or posting) of a website to be expedited. Then, a keyword or term associated with
322-406: The contention that led to the change. Every HTTP URL conforms to the syntax of a generic URI. The URI generic syntax consists of five components organized hierarchically in order of decreasing significance from left to right: A component is undefined if it has an associated delimiter and the delimiter does not appear in the URI; the scheme and path components are always defined. A component
345-455: The context of NAP's " long tail " experience when it gave away free access to PDFs (about 50% of the list) to low-sales content, which resulted in only 33% loss of sales, over 18 months (while enabling 100 times the dissemination). Through mid-2006, as reported at the AAUP annual meeting, the NAP remained financially self-sustaining as a publisher, even while progressively expanding the utility of
368-665: The domain name and path. The domain name in the IRI is known as an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN). Web and Internet software automatically convert the domain name into punycode usable by the Domain Name System ; for example, the Chinese URL http://例子.卷筒纸 becomes http://xn--fsqu00a.xn--3lr804guic/ . The xn-- indicates that the character was not originally ASCII . The URL path name can also be specified by
391-413: The file-system hierarchy. Many address bars offer features like autocomplete and a list of suggestions while the address is being typed in. This auto-completion feature bases its suggestions on the browser's history. Some browsers have keyboard shortcuts to auto-complete an address. In addition to the URL, some address bars feature icons showing features or information about the site. For websites using
414-442: The final viewable object. From 1998 on, the NAP developed the "Openbook" online navigational envelope, producing stable page URLs , and enabling chapter-, page-, and in-book search navigation to images of the book pages, which were increasingly replaced by HTML chunks to enable the user to browse the book. This page-by-page navigation was produced long before Amazon's Look Inside, or Google's Book Search. The NAP gradually evolved
437-407: The list price, and if the answer was "no", the NAP would offer one more step off the price. The conclusion was that 42% of customers, when interrupted when buying a print book online, would take the free PDF of the book, meaning that 58% of the potential purchasers were willing to pay to have a printed book. Significant implications to publishing strategies are produced by these numbers, especially in
460-522: The online experience, and increasing its online traffic and dissemination. Multiple articles and presentations by Barbara Kline Pope, executive director of the NAP, and by Michael Jon Jensen, director of publishing technologies for the NAP from 1998 through 2008, provide background on the evolving business strategies for "free in an environment of content abundance" that the National Academies Press continues to pursue. On June 2, 2011,
483-419: The protocol of the current page, typically HTTP or HTTPS. Address bar In a web browser , the address bar (also location bar or URL bar ) is the element that shows the current URL . The user can type a URL into it to navigate to a chosen website. In most modern browsers, non-URLs are automatically sent to a search engine. In a file browser, it serves the same purpose of navigation, but through
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#1732771951842506-449: The use of a search engine if the term typed in is not clearly a URL. This will usually also auto-complete, if the search engine offers this feature, to popular answers, some engines even suggesting answers to basic maths queries. Some browsers, such as Firefox , Opera and Google Chrome , allow for website-specific searches to be set by the user. For example, by associating the shortcut "!w" with Misplaced Pages , "!w cake" can be entered into
529-626: The user in the local writing system. If not already encoded, it is converted to UTF-8 , and any characters not part of the basic URL character set are escaped as hexadecimal using percent-encoding ; for example, the Japanese URL http://example.com/引き割り.html becomes http://example.com/%E5%BC%95%E3%81%8D%E5%89%B2%E3%82%8A.html . The target computer decodes the address and displays the page. Protocol-relative links (PRL), also known as protocol-relative URLs (PRURL), are URLs that have no protocol specified. For example, //example.com will use
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