When to use the term "url" or "link"?

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These days I started a "little debate" here in IT on this subject. I realized that several functions, where we returned the image path (to the browser), was named getImageLink.

For example:

public function getImageLink() {

      return $this->base_url . '/imagens/' . $this->id . '.jpg';
}

The return of this would be:

'http://meusite/imagens/1.jpg'

Then I started thinking that maybe "link" referred to a "url" used with the tag <a>. I do not know if my statement is correct, but in the end I decided to change the name of the methods, which have come to be called getImageUrl.

I picked up the custom when listening to people talking "link" and "url" when it comes to the address of a website we typed in the browser’s navigation bar, for example.

Questions

  • From a programming point of view, I should call this "image path" (for the browser), "url" or "link"?

  • What is "link" and what is "url"? What is the difference between one and the other?

  • To be "link", it has to be something clickable?

terminology
  • 4

    Specifically about URL: http://answall.com/q/43224/101

1 answer

13


The "path" of an image, or any resource, is always a URL.

The acronym URL means "Uniform Resource Finder" and describes the address naming pattern of anything that can be accessed on a network.

The term "Hyperlink" is derived from the concept of Hypertext and strongly associated with Web.

Because of the ubiquity of the Web, the 2 terms have become almost interchangeable since every link will point to a URL, and almost every URL you access comes from a link. Informally there will be no distinction or problem in using the 2 terms at will.

In the case of a function such as your example, what is being returned is a URL, not a hyperlink. This will be the case for most functions of this type, unless they exist to mount a hyperlink within a hypertext page.

I find it hard that anyone reading your code will get confused if you use getImageLink instead of getImageURL, but the correct in this case would be getImageURL.

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