What do you call the entire first part of a URL?

If I have a URL like:

http://www.example.com:9090/test.html

Then I know that www.example.com is the host name, but what do you call http://www.example.com:9090? Is there some kind of established name for that?

It is called the origin.

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More generally speaking, here are the different parts of a URL, as per window.location. (So at least according to how Javascript calls it)

protocol://username:password@hostname:port/pathname?search#hash
-----------------------------href------------------------------
                             -----host----
-----------      origin      -------------

• protocol - protocol scheme of the URL, including the final ':'
• hostname - domain name
• port - port number
• pathname - /pathname
• search - ?parameters
• hash - #fragment_identifier
• username - username specified before the domain name
• password - password specified before the domain name
• href - the entire URL
• origin - protocol://hostname:port
• host - hostname:port

Formal definition is in RFC 6454 section 4.

I don't know the name for when it has the scheme, but the hostname with the port is collectively known as the Authority. A nice explanation here.

• http:// - Protocol
• www - Server-Name (subdomain)
• example - Second Level Domain (SLD)
• com - Top Level Domain (TLD)
• 9090 - Port number
• /test.html - Path

Save the protocol, you can refer to 'www.example.com' as either the hostname or - more specifically - the 'fully qualified domain name'.

Toss in the '9090' and personally I'd be comfortable calling it the host, as that's usually what you'd get as the 'host' header in an HTTP request; something like 'host: www.example.com:9090';. In PHP it would be stored in the $_SERVER variable under 'HTTP_HOST' or 'SERVER_NAME'. In JavaScript it would be available as the document.location.host.

I don't know, what you could call it once you toss in 'http://' :(

RFC 3986 details the syntax components. The part you refer to would be the scheme (http) and authority (www.example.com:9090).

FWIW, the .Net framework Uri class goes for "GetLeftPart()". It's irritating not having a proper name for "scheme + authority"

I don't think so. If there was, I would expect the DOM to reflect this in the window.location class: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM/Window.location

You can read about every part of URL on Wikipedia. You'll find there that http is a protocol name, :9090 determines that the connection should be establishment on port #9090 etc.

It means that the HTTP server hosting example.com is using the port 9090 for processing HTTP requests, it is a directive to the browser that it should connect to that server on port 9090 instead of 80 which it normally does if the port is not specified