What each word properly covers
The address is the 56 character string plus the .onion suffix. It identifies a key and nothing more. It has no scheme, no path and no port. Every page on this site that prints a value in monospace is printing an address.
The url is the address wrapped in everything a browser needs, which means a scheme in front and possibly a path and a query behind. A TorZon market url and a TorZon market address are therefore not the same string, and a url can carry a path that the person who gave it to you chose.
The link is the loosest of the three. In ordinary speech a link is whatever you click, which might be a url, might be text somebody pasted, might be a button whose destination you cannot see. When a page offers you a TorZon working link the word is doing no work at all.
Why the difference bites
A path can point anywhere within a service. If you are handed a url rather than a bare address, you have accepted somebody else's choice about where inside the service you land, and that choice is invisible in a shortened display. The address portion can be completely correct while the path takes you somewhere you did not intend.
This is the practical reason this site prints bare addresses and nothing else. Every copy button on every page copies the 56 characters plus the suffix. There is no scheme, no path and no tracking parameter, because there is nothing for one to be hidden in. What you paste is what you can see.
It is also why the shortened form used in listings shows the first eight characters and the last eight rather than the beginning of the string alone. Truncating only the end is the format that hides the most, since the part left visible is the part that is cheap to imitate.
Reading a claim carefully
When somebody claims a TorZon market url is current, ask which of the three things they checked. A claim about an address is a claim about 56 characters. A claim about a url includes a path they may have chosen. A claim about a link is not a claim about anything you can inspect.
| Term | What it contains | What can be hidden in it |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 56 characters plus .onion | Nothing, it is fully visible |
| Url | Scheme, address, optional path and query | The path and the query |
| Link | Whatever the page attached to the text | The entire destination |
This site deals only in the first row. That is a limitation and it is also the reason the copy buttons can be trusted to give you exactly what is printed beside them.
Questions
Should a TorZon url start with http or https?
Onion services are reached over the Tor network, which provides its own end to end encryption to the service, so the plain scheme is normal and is not a downgrade in the way it would be on the ordinary web.
Why does this site never print a path after an address?
Because a path is a choice made by whoever wrote the link, and it is invisible once the string is shortened for display. Bare addresses have nowhere to hide anything.