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Throughout this video we are going to be using the term URI an awful lot. And you are not
going to see the term URL as much. URI's is an acronym for "uniform resource identifier"
and URL is an acronym for "uniform resource locator".
The difference between the two is that a URI is basically a name. It's a representation
of an entity of some kind of resource somewhere. Whereas a URL specifies where that resource
can be found. So a URL is a URI but a URI is not a URL.
Because a URL is a form of identification, it belongs under a subset of URI, but URI's
aren't always going to show where a resource can be found.
When we're going through this video you'll see URI's like "public colon slash slash"
and then the name of a file, whereas the URL will look something like "HTTP colon slash
slash" the name of the file and the location of it. Because it provides the location and
the protocol, which is the HTTP part, used to access that file, then that's considered
a URL.
One helpful way to think about the difference between URI's and URL's when developing for
Drupal, is that in the past in Drupal 6 and Drupal 5, we accessed files according to their
file path. So we used the file path in order to reference them. In Drupal 7 however, what
we're going to do is use a URI. So I mentioned one just a moment ago which was "public colon
slash slash" which is an indicator that the URI is pointing to a location on the server
that is publicly accessible. And we'll talk about this in more detail when we discuss
stream wrappers, but the basic ideal is that we're using URI's instead of file paths to
access files.
On the other hand, when we want to make a file accessible through say a browser, we
want to make sure that we have a URL which points to the location of the file and specifies
what protocol we are using in order to access the file. So, in a typical URL it will be
an HTTP protocol and then it will point to the location where that file can be downloaded.