I’ve noticed that Wordpress and some other folks use “URI” to identify what I’ve frequently called URLs. The reason I call them “URLs” is because this seems to be more universally understood by webmasters. But for the purists in the audience wondering which is accurate — URL or URI — let’s consult the web consortium for the definition and official explanation, w3.org:

Over time, the importance of this additional level of hierarchy seemed to lessen; the view became that an individual scheme does not need to be cast into one of a discrete set of URI types such as “URL”, “URN”, “URC”, etc. Web-identifer schemes are in general URI schemes; a given URI scheme may define subspaces. Thus “http:” is a URI scheme. “urn:” is also a URI scheme; it defines subspaces, called “namespaces”. For example, the set of URNs of the form “urn:isbn:n-nn-nnnnnn-n” is a URN namespace. (”isbn” is an URN namespace identifier. It is not a “URN scheme” nor a “URI scheme”). Further according to the contemporary view, the term “URL” does not refer to a formal partition of URI space; rather, URL is a useful but informal concept: a URL is a type of URI that identifies a resource via a representation of its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network “location”), rather than by some other attributes it may have. Thus as we noted, “http:” is a URI scheme. An http URI is a URL. The phrase “URL scheme” is now used infrequently, usually to refer to some subclass of URI schemes which exclude URNs.

The consortium doesn’t help much to dispel the confusion that they identify themselves, check this opening paragraph:

There is some confusion in the web community over the partitioning of URI space, specifically, the relationship among the concepts of URL, URN, and URI. The confusion owes to the incompatibility between two different views of URI partitioning, which we call the “classical” and “contemporary” views.

Don’t you just love geek speak? Why is technical documentation always written like this? Is it just me or does somebody need to get Professor Strunk in there to say: “Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”

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