URL Dualism

Duality in URL

We can use quotation marks when we want to talk about a word, rather than using the word itself. For example, we can say the word “verbose” means “using too many words.” It’s a bit like the difference between a pointer and a value; we understand that the pointer stands in as a way to refer to the value.

URLs have the same duality. A URL is a reference to a representation of a value. We can exchange the URL for that representation by resolving it, just like dereferencing the point. Like a pointer, we can also pass the URL around as an identifier. A program may receive a URL, store it as ...