Why www.?

[david_s]

Does anyone know why the need to type www. before a web address? It is such a waste of time typing the same, non-changing, prefix everytime.

And why do some sites work without using the www. prefix and some (like www.whufc.com) not?

[Wacky Racer]

Quinny said:

Err its only 3 letters and a dot

How long can it take to type them??? 1 maybe 2 seconds.

You must be a very busy man

Depends whether you're a one finger typist or not..............

[rich-uk]

www = world wide web. It's the name of the computer you access for world wide web content at a company. If you wanted to transfer files or send mail you'd use ftp. or mail. for example.

Edit: If you don't put www, your browser adds it automatically as you usually get web contect thorough a browser and web contect is usually server from a computer called www in the company's network domain (e.g. pistonheads.com)

Edited by rich-uk on Sunday 6th May 23:04

[zaktoo]

Short answer is there are potentially many servers in a domain that might need to be accessible via easily remembered names. To do this and keep administration down to a minimum, it became standard practice to refer to a server with a mnemonic prefixed to the rest of the domain, so for example, a mail server might be mail.carfolio.com or pop.carfolio.com, a dns server might be dns.carfolio.com, an ftp server ftp.carfolio.com and a web server www.carfolio.com . (WWW stands for world-wide web). It is quite common practice, but certainly not universal) to alias just the domain (without prefix) to the same address as the web server for that domain, but it can potentially cause problems. The www bit is not required for a web server to work though, it's just a convention that's stuck.

Edit: bah, beaten by 3 minutes

Edited by zaktoo on Sunday 6th May 23:07

[david_s]

rich-uk said:

www = world wide web. It's the name of the computer you access for world wide web content at a company. If you wanted to transfer files or send mail you'd use ftp. or mail. for example.

Edit: If you don't put www, your browser adds it automatically as you usually get web contect thorough a browser and web contect is usually server from a computer called www in the company's network domain (e.g. pistonheads.com)

Edited by rich-uk on Sunday 6th May 23:04

Thanks for the answer.

I know that www is an acronym for world wide web, I just don't understand the point in having to type it everytime a website is accessed.

If I type www.whufc.com in Firefox it works whereas whufc.com doesn't.

[zaktoo]

david_s said:

If I type www.whufc.com in Firefox it works whereas whufc.com doesn't.

It all depends if the domain administrator has decided to alias the domain itself to the web server. As I said above, it can potentially cause problems and is certainly not standard practice.

Ciao

Zak

[simpo two]

At least the 'http://' bit has been dispensed with. I always chuckle when I see it written out in it ponderous maximumness...

[zaktoo]

simpo two said:

At least the 'http://' bit has been dispensed with. I always chuckle when I see it written out in it ponderous maximumness...

It's just behind the scenes these days, you still need it from time to time (for example in a link to an external site on a web page), but almost never on the client/user side.

Edited by zaktoo on Sunday 6th May 23:48

[ThePassenger]

zaktoo said:

simpo two said:

At least the 'http://' bit has been dispensed with. I always chuckle when I see it written out in it ponderous maximumness...

It's just behind the scenes these days, you still need it from time to time (for example in a link to an external site on a web page), but almost never on the client/user side.

Edited by zaktoo on Sunday 6th May 23:48

Indeed the client assumes hyper text transport protocol (http) unless specifically told otherwise (ftp://, steam:// and so on). Makes it easier to use the browsers but it's still the same old behaviour (just watch the 'what am I doing' bar ).