this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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[–] cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de 27 points 19 hours ago

Its a subdomain you have to make sure you point to your main domain at your domain registar

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 140 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.works 60 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.works 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.works 16 points 21 hours 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.

[–] CidVicious@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago

Well also at one point www.domain.com may have actually been a single physical server. That hasn't been true for sites of any size in a long time.

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[–] Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 5 points 14 hours ago

It never got over you

[–] vollkorntomate@infosec.pub 43 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Some websites still require you to type www. explicitly.

For example, my university… Try https://tu-darmstadt.de/ and then try https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/

I find that annoying because I’m lazy 😂

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 32 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

I am a dev, and it makes me think whoever is in charge is extremely incompetent.

[–] oldfart@lemm.ee 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Or old school. Web used to be just one of the provided services. mail.tu-darmstad.de, ftp.tu-darmstad.de, www.tu-darmstad.de, not prioritizing any of them

[–] gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 5 points 13 hours ago

If you're in charge of running a live environment and running it like it's still the 90s, then you're incompetent.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 8 points 20 hours ago

www is just a host name, totally arbitrary.

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.

[–] sundray@lemmus.org 48 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's still out there. Watching. Waiting. Uh... Winking?

[–] doug@lemmy.today 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh thank god that last word was “winking.”

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] doug@lemmy.today 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

THATS THE WORD I DIDNT WANT. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!1!!

[–] BambiDiego@lemmy.world 6 points 22 hours ago

Wonmiserating?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 38 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

There's a whole ass Home Movies episode where they keep saying "you don't have to say www" in reference to how ubiquitous the web had become that you could talk about a website without needing to reference the www prefix.

That was over 20 years ago.

[–] Rozz 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't remember that episode, but that's a good pull. I imagine coach did not understand.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Pretty sure it's a different episode, but there's a credits joke of Coach registering "fenton's naked mom dot com." From Season 3, episode 1 "Shore Leave."

https://fentonsnakedmom.com/

~~I'm having trouble finding the "you don't have to say www" episode and I'm not gonna rewatch a bunch of every episode to find it right now ha.~~

Actually, nevermind, just found it. Season 4, episode 1 "Everybody's Entitled to My Opinion." The episode starts with this discussion about the www.

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 3 points 21 hours ago

and then I sign it "Movie Guy"

is Movie Guy your pseudonym?

no it's just a name I use instead of my real name

I love Home Movies

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 24 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.me 13 points 22 hours 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.

[–] beejjorgensen 13 points 21 hours ago

Any old slashdotters remember tcwww, The Cursed www? Just me?

[–] Toes@ani.social 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm still hopeful that gopher makes a comeback.

[–] db2@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Archie and Veronica.

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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago

Plus domains should've gone left to right in terms of root, tld, domain, subdomain, etc., instead of right to left.

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 23 hours ago

They even don't support HTTPS on the older articles for that authentic 2009 internet

[–] cron@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 4 points 5 hours ago

i like how saying "word wide web" is faster than saying "www"

[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 4 points 21 hours ago

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

[–] ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (4 children)

How else would you say it?

"Wwwwuuuuhh dot Google dot com"?

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

[–] Wiz@midwest.social 4 points 17 hours ago

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

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours 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 😅

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 5 points 21 hours ago

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

[–] cron@feddit.org 6 points 23 hours ago

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

[–] troglodyte_mignon@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago

Same thing in French. Doublevédoublevédoublevé. So. long.

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's easy to redirect a domain such as "archive.org" to "www.archive.org" and vice versa. Just a line in your webserver config. Or just serve it directly from the former.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Ideally you want to do one or the other unless you really like the redirect loop error page in your browser.

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 20 hours ago

Security by ~~obscurity~~ infinite redirection

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago

I'm a rebel. And that's my security plan.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Just like how back in the earlier days, you didn't necessarily have to type "http://" before the www.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 8 points 21 hours ago

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

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