Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with thos…
  • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1382·
    6 days ago

    Originally the idea was that you would have a domain and then have a host under that domain for each service (e.g. mail.example.net, ftp.example.net, www.example.net,…). Of course eventually the web was used by a lot more people this directly than any other service so the main domain was also configured to point at the web server and then people added a redirect either in one direction (add www.) or the other (remove www.) on the first request.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      55·
      6 days ago

      The final piece is that often each of those services would be on a different computer entirely, each with a different public IP address. Otherwise the port is sufficient to sperate most services on a common domain.

      There was a good long while where IP addresses were still unutilized enough that there was no reason to even try being conservative.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        271·
        6 days ago

        Originally there also wasn’t any name-based virtual hosting, especially in SSL/TLS-based services like HTTPS so you needed one IP per name if you wanted to host multiple websites.

        And part of the disappearance of www. now is probably that strange decision by Chrome to hide it.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          17·
          6 days ago

          Chromes decision actually makes a lot of sense, from a security perspective. When we model how people read URLs, they tend to be “lazy” and accept two URLs as equal if they’re similar enough. Removing or taking focus away from less critical parts makes users focus more on the part that matters and helps reduce phishing. It’s easier to miss problems with https://www.bankotamerica.com/login_new/existing/login_portal.asp?etc=etc&etc=etc than it is with bankotamerica, with the com in a subdued grey and the path and subdomain hidden until you click in the address bar.
          It’s the same reason why they ended up moving away from the lock icon. Certs are easy to get now, and every piece that matches makes it more likely for a user to skip a warning sign.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      342·
      6 days ago

      That’s a 5-minute workaround in the server config. Hate it when idiots skip that. I’m no dev, but I’ve done it many times.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      When I was in school it was just when all this was starting and people were starting to get used to the internet. There are a lot of websites they thought were inappropriate for children to look at (mostly they were harmless). Anyway if you didn’t enter www. in front of the web address, it bypassed all of the site block filters.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      When I was in school it was just when all this was starting and people were starting to get used to the internet. There are a lot of websites they thought were inappropriate for children to look at (mostly they were harmless). Anyway if you didn’t enter www. in front of the web address, it bypassed all of the site block filters.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      I prefer it, so I just redirect HTTP requests my root domain to the www version. I think it makes a ton of sense, since I www is merely one of the many services I host at my domain.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    22·
    6 days ago

    There’s another, more DNS-related, reason why it was usually preferred to have something before the domain part. It’s possible to alias a subdomain to another subdomain, but not so with the root of a domain, which must point directly at a single IP address.

    If your IP addresses are more subject to change than your hostnames, or your site was hosted on a third party service, then it made sense to point www at a particular hostname rather than its address. e.g. you might point www.your-domain-here.biz at a-hostname.the-hosting-provider.tld. That’s not possible with a root domain. IP address or nothing.

    Similarly, it’s possible to point a subdomain at multiple IP addresses (or multiple hostnames) at the same time, which was a cheap way to do load balancing. i.e. For a site a user hadn’t visited before, they’d be basically told one of the listed IP addresses at random, and then their local DNS cache would return that one IP address until it expired, generally giving enough time for the visitor to do what they wanted. Slap 8 different IPs in the www subdomain and you’d split your visitors across 8 different servers.

    Root domain has no such capability.

    Technically it would be possible to do all of that one level higher in DNS where your domain itself is the subdomain, but good luck getting a domain registry to do that for you.

    I haven’t done DNS in over a decade at this point, so things may have changed in the intervening years, but this was all definitely a thing once upon a time.

  • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    6 days ago

    Also tangentially related: one of Tim Berners-Lee’s regrets is the two forward slashes between the protocol scheme and the domain name

    Also I love that the older BBC articles are frozen in time like this

  • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
    8·
    6 days ago

    It annoys me how www. is pronounced in english. Really, double-u double-u double-u dot example dot com?

    • Zombie-Mantis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      How else would you say it?

      “Wwwwuuuuhh dot Google dot com”?

      Edit: or I guess, “world wide web” would make more sense?

      • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        “web” would have sounded nice and clear, we also didn’t name FTP the World Wide File Transfer Protocol (WWFTP).

      • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        In other languages, German for instance, it’s pronounced kinda like “weh” or like the letter V in English. It’s easier to say that way. Back in the day I sometimes said “triple double u” to not have to say it the actual, complicated way 😅

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    45·
    5 days ago

    The article seems to not understand the difference between a subdomain and a name.

    No poInt in reading.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    143·
    6 days ago

    There’s no WWW anymore. There’s content and there are Internet platforms. You should consume content and and hold your breath for what platforms have for you, as part of a crowd many-many times bigger than the one at Mecca. Not G-d forbid host websites and visit them, read what others have to say, see culture and history of something real.