Two URLs in one link! Why and How?

Hi all,

Two URLs in one link. EG: "http;//www.example.com/http;//www.somesite.com. (I think some character goes in between the URLs)
I pretty sure I have seen this used before, but never understood why it was used so I never took much notice.
My guess as to why it would be used, would be to pass on the the first URL as the referrer to the second URL?.
Is there even such a thing? or did the webmaster make a mistake when making the link? Or have I imagined it?

So If this is a technique.. then, is there a way to use this technique to refresh a page when linking to a file?
To try and explain a bit better.. if I am on someones website (example.com) and there is a link to a zip file that is on someone else's site (somesite.com/some.zip), and I click that link, I do not go to the page that has the file, I am just prompted to download it! and I don't move away from the original page. Now is there a way to add the URL of the page that has the link to the URL of the file..
EG: http;//www.example.com/index.html/http;//www.somesite.com/some.zip and would that cause http;//www.example.com/index.html to refresh and then get the file?
If so could someone tell me what the character is that goes between the URLs? I think it may be ? but cannot find any examples of it.

Cheers
James

 

I think it would be a redirection link. They do not pass page rank to the other site.

 

Some websites, like some of Google's tools, or I believe archive.org, use URLs for showing database items, like so:

http://archive.org/view.php?url=http://funnystuff.com

So it's possible you might've seen something like this as well:

http://archive.org/?http://funnystuff.com

Since there's ways to not need the little url= or page= thing, and if that file is the default one, say index.php, for example, you wouldn't need to put the filename in the address either.

 

Thanks.. that is most likely what I saw and misunderstood what it was.. thanks for clearing that up..

So can the ?, url= or page= be used as a redirect in html? or, (In my case) to reload the first URL before fetching a file in a html form? Or are these only for database stuff?
Sorry if these seem like noob questions... but... Um.. I'm a noob

Cheers
James

 

Nope, these can only be used in server-side languages, not HTML and CSS.

 

You can parse query strings with javascript too:
http://adamv.com/dev/javascript/querystring

 

Thanks mate.. Just had a quick look and it flew right over my head
I will look at it again tomorrow after work, I will do some research and see if I can get some sort of a result. Thanks again

Cheers
James