Noob question of the day about www

[Ghost]

Originally posted by: NogginBoink


So "www" is not optional. www.somedomain.com and somedomain.com are entirely different DNS queries. It's up to the owner of the DNS zone to point them both to the same place if they wand you to be able to omit the www and still get to the webserver.

Maybe what DanJ meant when he said ...

the www. part is optional

...was that most owners point both www.somedomain.com and somedomain.com to the same computer, and therefore you're usually safe leaving off the www.

 

[AMCRambler]

Alright, so if it's arbitrary what the first part of the url is, why the naming convention then? Why www. or .com/.edu/.net/.org or whatever? Why not just "anandtech"? I get what you're saying though. The browser doesn't parse the first part. It just resolves the address and redirects there, I knew that believe it or not, but I had a brain fart. That's the whole domain hosting business in a nutshell. But then why bother subdividing that with www. or any of the other stuff when it serves no purpose? Do search engines differentiate by looking at these? If I search for education related information it doesn't just look at .edu sites. The prefix and postfix to the domain name don't seem to have a purpose at all then. So they basically aren't used, nor have the ever been? Maybe it was something that was originally coded in with the intention it could be used as a further delineation of the web but it never was? I can believe that. I've seen it in a lot of programs I've worked with. Anybody?

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: AMCRambler
Alright, so if it's arbitrary what the first part of the url is, why the naming convention then? Why www. or .com/.edu/.net/.org or whatever? Why not just "anandtech"? I get what you're saying though. The browser doesn't parse the first part. It just resolves the address and redirects there, I knew that believe it or not, but I had a brain fart. That's the whole domain hosting business in a nutshell. But then why bother subdividing that with www. or any of the other stuff when it serves no purpose? Do search engines differentiate by looking at these? If I search for education related information it doesn't just look at .edu sites. The prefix and postfix to the domain name don't seem to have a purpose at all then. So they basically aren't used, nor have the ever been? Maybe it was something that was originally coded in with the intention it could be used as a further delineation of the web but it never was? I can believe that. I've seen it in a lot of programs I've worked with. Anybody?

Well, you probably already know how .com was supposed to be commercial, .org for nonprofit, .net for ISPs, .edu for educational institutions, .gov, .mil, etc.

Except .com, .net, .org were not heavily regulated. No one made sure they were only registered for the given purpose, so the meaning of those suffixes has pretty much been diluted to the point of uselessness.

The newer .biz, .info, .name TLDs are supposedly better enforced, although they still don't seem to have caught on at all.

So the suffix is pretty meaningless, as you assert. Created with good intentions, but just didn't work out in practice.
The prefix is still useful because it can be defined by the site administrator, as long as the administrator uses sensible names. Microsoft has a lot of sites that you can guess at just by going to <whatever>.microsoft.com

Also, multple prefixes allows for a hierarchy.

www.school.edu is the school's webserver.
www.cs.school.edu is the school's CS department's webserver.
www.ai.cs.school.edu would be the school's artiticial intelligence lab's web server, which is part of the CS department.

But yeah...for the most part, the suffix is garbage.

 

[AMCRambler]

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: AMCRambler
Alright, so if it's arbitrary what the first part of the url is, why the naming convention then? Why www. or .com/.edu/.net/.org or whatever? Why not just "anandtech"? I get what you're saying though. The browser doesn't parse the first part. It just resolves the address and redirects there, I knew that believe it or not, but I had a brain fart. That's the whole domain hosting business in a nutshell. But then why bother subdividing that with www. or any of the other stuff when it serves no purpose? Do search engines differentiate by looking at these? If I search for education related information it doesn't just look at .edu sites. The prefix and postfix to the domain name don't seem to have a purpose at all then. So they basically aren't used, nor have the ever been? Maybe it was something that was originally coded in with the intention it could be used as a further delineation of the web but it never was? I can believe that. I've seen it in a lot of programs I've worked with. Anybody?

Well, you probably already know how .com was supposed to be commercial, .org for nonprofit, .net for ISPs, .edu for educational institutions, .gov, .mil, etc.

Except .com, .net, .org were not heavily regulated. No one made sure they were only registered for the given purpose, so the meaning of those suffixes has pretty much been diluted to the point of uselessness.

The newer .biz, .info, .name TLDs are supposedly better enforced, although they still don't seem to have caught on at all.

So the suffix is pretty meaningless, as you assert. Created with good intentions, but just didn't work out in practice.
The prefix is still useful because it can be defined by the site administrator, as long as the administrator uses sensible names. Microsoft has a lot of sites that you can guess at just by going to <whatever>.microsoft.com

Also, multple prefixes allows for a hierarchy.

www.school.edu is the school's webserver.
www.cs.school.edu is the school's CS department's webserver.
www.ai.cs.school.edu would be the school's artiticial intelligence lab's web server, which is part of the CS department.

But yeah...for the most part, the suffix is garbage.

Ok that sounds about right then. It also sounds like the ISO or whoever is in charge of the intarweb standards needs to clean up their crap. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy! Lol!

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: AMCRambler
Ok that sounds about right then. It also sounds like the ISO or whoever is in charge of the intarweb standards needs to clean up their crap. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy! Lol!

It basically ballooned. The guys that came up with this stuff didn't think that it would get so huge so quickly. That's why they chose a 32-bit addressing scheme. Surely there would never be any need for more than about 4 billion addresses.........right?

It worked well for what it was envisioned, but when it caught on the way it did, it really threw a monkey wrench in the works!

 

[alkemyst]

multiple domain URL's do not have to be multiple servers.

usa-info.domain.com

forums.domain.com

www.domain.com

etc can all be the same box.

&Aring;