Summary

  • RFC 1392 listed email, IP and hardware addresses in 1993. RFC 1983 added URL as a fourth common type in 1996.
  • RFC 1738 had already put URL syntax on the Standards Track; HTTP/1.0 was still Informational, and RFC 1983 said its formal standard was under development.

In January 1993, the Internet Users’ Glossary gave “address” three common meanings: email, IP and hardware. The Web was already in the same glossary. What had not made the address list was the string a reader could use to locate a page or another resource: the URL.

That missing line is the story. Across the two editions, the glossary changed what it counted as an Internet address.

RFC 1738 defined URL syntax and semantics in December 1994. It was a Standards Track document, describing a URL as a compact representation for locating and accessing an Internet resource. Its scheme told a program how to interpret the rest. A URL could point toward a resource without being the host’s IP address or a network interface’s hardware address.

In May 1996, RFC 1945 published HTTP/1.0 as Informational. The IESG expected a Standards Track replacement, while the RFC’s abstract said the Web had used HTTP since 1990. The protocol already carried pages; its formal paperwork had not caught up with the use its authors recorded.

Three months later, RFC 1983 replaced the 1993 glossary. Its address entry listed four common types: email, IP, hardware and URL. The new URL entry described a compact string for an Internet resource, used primarily to retrieve information through the WWW. Nearby, the same glossary described HTTP as the protocol that transfers HTML and said its formal standard was still under development in the IETF.

The documents did different jobs. RFC 1738 described the locator. RFC 1945 recorded common HTTP/1.0 behavior as an Informational memo. RFC 1983 gave readers a vocabulary that now included resource locations beside people, hosts and hardware. In January 1997, RFC 2068 moved HTTP/1.1 onto the Standards Track.

The URL’s syntax entered the standards track before HTTP/1.0 did, and the glossary called URLs common Internet addresses while HTTP standardization was still in progress. A reader could already use the Web as the standards record kept two separate ledgers: where the resource was, and how its page travelled.

The RFCs contain no reader survey; a contemporary browser-use record would show whether the editors’ “common” label matched how people actually entered URLs.

Sources