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
    1532·
    25 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
      67·
      25 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
        341·
        25 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
          20·
          25 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
      382·
      25 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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      25 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.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      22 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·
      22 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.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    25·
    25 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.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
      14·
      25 days ago

      You can return multiple A/AAAA records for the root, the TLD delegates the whole thing to your nameservers and it’s free to return whatever you want. Registrars actually do let you set records on the TLD’s zone, it’s called glue records and they’re typically used to solve the nameserver chicken and egg problem where you might want to be your own nameservers. Mine’s set that way:

      ~ $ drill NS max-p.me
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, rcode: NOERROR, id: 32318
;; flags: qr rd ra ; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; max-p.me.    IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
max-p.me.       3600    IN      NS      ns2.max-p.me.
max-p.me.       3600    IN      NS      ns1.max-p.me.

      The me registrar will give you the IP for those two so you can then ask my server for where max-p.me really is.

      The bigger issue is usually there’s a bunch of stuff under your root domain like MX records, TXT records, potentially subdomains. That’s a huge problem if you need to CNAME the root to a hosting provider, as the CNAME will forward the entire domain including MX and TXT records. Cloudflare sort of works around that with server side flattening of CNAMEs, but that’s not standard. But if you have a www subdomain, then it’s a complete non-issue. And really, do you want to delegate your MX records to WP Engine?

      The main reason people went without the www is the good old “it looks cooler and shorter” while ignoring all the technical challenges its brings, and that’s probably why browsers now hide the www so that website designers don’t have to do this atrocity.

  • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    25 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
    9·
    25 days ago

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

    • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachtsEnglish
      4·
      25 days ago

      My favorite part of watching WWE is the way their main commentator says “WWE”. You can tell he savors every syllable of it

    • Zombie-Mantis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      25 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
        7·
        25 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
        7·
        25 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 😅

      • Wiz@midwest.socialEnglish
        5·
        25 days ago

        I’ve heard “dub-dub-dub”. But yeah, saying the abbreviation is longer than the words it’s abbreviating! 😀

      • Dave.@aussie.zoneEnglish
        5·
        25 days ago

        “Wuh-wuh-wuh”, using pronunciation similar to the start of “wow” or “woman”

    • 4am@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      25 days ago

      In the earliest days you absolutely did, it became optional later; especially once gopher:// stopped being a thing

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    55·
    24 days ago

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

    No poInt in reading.