"www" (1 Viewer)

[Captain pi]

I have noticed that the traditional 'www.' that I love so much is starting to depart from websites, including BoS. Does anyone know why this is or what it signifies?

 

[Lazarus]

It's a fairly redundant prefix... doesn't appear to do anything except lengthen the URL.

 

[Trev]

whats to love about it?! it causes the typing of 4 extra characters (www.) :uhhuh:

 

[Rafy]

you usually dont have to put http:// anymore either...much better

 

[iambored]

i have never put in http

www. is still on bos for me
i think the good thing is you instantly recognise something written is a web address. all keyboards should have it as one character

 

[Rafy]

on some sites i dont have to even put in .com (maybe its a firefox thing i dont know) e.g "apple"

 

[iambored]

mine automatically searches msn, so if i type apple, it goes to msn search


edit: no, my computer has been working strangely recently, it just says the page is not available

 

[Rafy]

WHen i type "apple" it goes to www.apple.com

 

[Adrian.]

on some sites i dont have to even put in .com (maybe its a firefox thing i dont know) e.g "apple"

Yeah it's a Firefox thing. Look down the bottem and it searches Google so I guess it's just like doing a 'I'm feeling lucky' search. It's a nice feature.

 

[Slidey]

you usually dont have to put http:// anymore either...much better

Whilst most browsers do indeed substitute 'http://' in if you do not enter it, it IS a required portion of the address. Note that if you do not type the 'www.', the browser does NOT substitute it in - it is not required. The reason being, without the 'http://' you could be referring to a file on your computer, or an ftp or anything.

As far as I can tell, 'www.' appears to be merely a subdomain which mirrors the same address minus 'www.'.

 

[goan_crazy]

i just put boredofstudies.org and the www automatically comes up

 

[Plebeian]

I am a fan of dropping www. I think it's happening because 'www' takes so long to pronounce in audiovisual media. For a company looking to promote their website, it's much more punchy to just say amazon.com or apple.com than to have to include the w's. For whoever said www makes it obvious that it's a website, you can still recognise that pretty quickly from the domain suffix...

 

[goan_crazy]

BOS is usually the first addy in the scroll down box whre u type in the web addy so i just click on it

yeah same lolz

 

[bubz :D]

hmmm... i'ved noticed that there are some websites that don't work if you don't put the www in front of it, eg http://www.uac.edu.au (well, on IE anyway)

 

[jm1234567890]

hmmm... i'ved noticed that there are some websites that don't work if you don't put the www in front of it, eg http://www.uac.edu.au (well, on IE anyway)

errr..... i think you should try that again

 

[bubz :D]

it doesn't work! serously (WITHOUT the www)

http://uac.edu.au

 

[Xayma]

You dont type http:// in the address bar.

Get rid of it all and go uac.edu.au

 

[CrashOveride]

My IE fires up the http:// even if not in the address bar, re: UAC website.
I too am in the same predicament as bubz.

 

[townie]

i'm a fan of www. because it's become 2nd nature to me these days

 

[MedNez]

To answer a few questions,

Why does "www" work on some sites, yet others don't need it?

The "www" prefix depends on the server you are running, and how their DNS addressing works, as well as what is powering the web server. Let's say you buy the domain "random.com".

You might want the subdomain of "news" and "personal", therefore you could go to http://news.random.com/ or http://personal.random.com/ to get to these. Going to just http://random.com would deliver you to your main page.

However, most web servers in the /directory/ where your site is on the hard drive of the server, list all the subdomains, so in the above case, you may have:

/home/www/
/home/news/
/home/personal/

So, going to news.random.com will load the /news/ directory, for example. Some servers will load /www/ if you don't specify a subdomain, and some will not, and herein lies the problem.

There are other factors contributing, but it depends on how the addressing for the site works, and how the server is set up. If you want to use "www", use it, if you don't, then don't. But if a site does not work without it, then you'll have to include it.

That's my understanding of the system anyway. A majority of servers do not require "www", but the minority is still a very large number of sites.

Couldn't we just remove it entirely?

We could, but mind you, websites, some forums, programs such as the office suite etc, will turn your text into a hyperlink if you type "www.", and companies usually publish their website addresses as "www.company.com", not just "company.com" on their business cards. It's just the accepted way of naming the address to a website.

Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken in that, but that's what I've learned over the years about how website indexing and subdomains work.

Regards,

Med