What is www. for?

[rvause]

I wasn't sure where to put this so I hope it's ok under networking.

I really want to know what www. is for. As an end user of the web I have never used www. before a domain name as it is just more effort to type (an extra 4 characters) that as far as I know bring you to the same place you would find without it. Whilst configuring DNS records I always create an master record for www. because I know people do immediately start typing www. into a browser's address bar before they even know what domain they are going to enter.

So wtf is www? Where did it come from and why does it exist?

[viking60]

It is something needed for Microsoft configurations. So the short version is, you don't need it.
The long version is that the World Wide Web was the early description of the internet. And it was the name of a hypertext project. Hypertext (most famous version being HTML) could link the documents together. This could be viewed by browsers in a client -server architecture.
The name was given by Robert Cailliau and Tim-Berners Lee:

A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[7] the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,[8] which described the project itself. On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.[9] This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet

I guess someone thought it was a good idea to put the name of the thing in the URL:

Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, as it is ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of such subdomain names is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch,[24] and many web sites exist without a www subdomain, or with some other name such as "www2", "secure", etc. Most web servers are set up such that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site, others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.

When a user submits an incomplete website address to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering 'microsoft' may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003.[25] It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.[26

[dedanna1029]

Notice something. I have always started typing in urls with http, not www, like most. If you don't start it with http, then it won't stay in your location field history; it loses itself directly if you start it with www or something else. Try it. You'll see what I mean.

Why is that?

[R_Head]

I saw a domumentry once that was OUI instead of WWW, but WWW was more appropriate.

Is funny though.... most of the Internet was designed by people that still alive. So is not that old!


What gets me is, why people still call it Internet? Is not any more an Internal Net since DARPA gave it all.

Might sound weird....

I have a concept idea.

What if, a new Web Protocol is inserted on the Web?

As analogy, 1 speak Spanish, 2 speaks English and 3 speaks German. We all use the Telephone and communicate via voice as long as a receiver that understand is on the other end.

So the communication with each node is based on a different protocol (as long all the routing devices understand the routing protocols).

In essence, you can have 2 or more Webs co-existing in the same Net.

Is like running TCP/IP and IPX simultaneously. Just the devices has to listen to certain request. Like a person on a room with all sorts of people talking different languages but you pick the languages you know. If you do not understand, it goes to the Bit Bucket

You can have a secured network with its proprietary protocol on the same "wire"

[dedanna1029]

I guess one could think of it as "interactive" rather than "internal" now.

[viking60]

Does not the inter stand for International?

[dedanna1029]

Yep I think so, actually.

[R_Head]

Nope, means Internal Network.

It was a way for the Department Of Defense to communicate with each other mainframes.


The old Air Force SAGE system was linked via an Internal Net (Internet).

What people call now a true Internet is the Intra Net (Intranet for short).

The Cloud should be called Externalnet and the close networks Internet.

When the Gov let the public to use the DoD Internal Network to communicate, kind of the name stuck.

I wonder why people does not use IPX instead of TCP/IP. I think IPX is a better idea.

[dedanna1029]

@Viking, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

[viking60]

Any way it is the international net now so we can go on calling it the internet and change the meaning of inter to international (If that has not been done already, I could not find anything conclusive in the Wiki).Works for me

[R_Head]

It was created by DARPA.

I was a system admin during my Military time (beside been a Helicopter Mechanic/Crew Chief/Flight Engineer). During training we were told that DARPA started and after having an functional Internet, Vice President Al Gore made it available all to grasp. Like GPS was made available to the public during the early 90s.

Before the Internet, corporations communicated their mainframes point-to-point via modem banks and was not really a TCP/IP or IPX protocol was more of proprietary data transfers like taking a Keyboard with miles long cords on Dumb or Smart Terminals.

[rvause]

Thanks for all the informative responses. Didn't expect the topic to digress into what Internet means ( :

I decided to modify my apache configuration for all domains I administer to include the following

Code: Select all

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com [NC]
   RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com$1 [R=301,L]


This way http://www.domain.com will 'redirect' to http://domain.com

I also found this site: http://no-www.org/. Using the url rewrite method above categories my setup as 'Class B' according to their validator, which they say is 'the most optimal no-www compliance level' as it 'remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary'