rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 05 May 17:24
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There’s no WWW anymore. There’s content and there are Internet platforms. You should consume content and and hold your breath for what platforms have for you, as part of a crowd many-many times bigger than the one at Mecca. Not G-d forbid host websites and visit them, read what others have to say, see culture and history of something real.
Canadian_Cabinet@lemmy.ca
on 05 May 17:38
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They did. They are not obligated by any rule to limit their associations like some dumb apes do
taladar@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 17:37
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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.
CidVicious@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 18:34
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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.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 18:35
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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.
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.
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 www.bankotamerica.com/…/login_portal.asp?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.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 May 18:01
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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.
“web” would have sounded nice and clear, we also didn’t name FTP the World Wide File Transfer Protocol (WWFTP).
lurch@sh.itjust.works
on 05 May 20:32
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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
on 05 May 21:52
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“Wuh-wuh-wuh”, using pronunciation similar to the start of “wow” or “woman”
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.
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.
vollkorntomate@infosec.pub
on 05 May 20:12
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Some websites still require you to type www. explicitly.
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
on 06 May 06:03
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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
on 05 May 22:52
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www is just a host name, totally arbitrary.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 06 May 01:31
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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.
threaded - newest
There’s no WWW anymore. There’s content and there are Internet platforms. You should consume content and and hold your breath for what platforms have for you, as part of a crowd many-many times bigger than the one at Mecca. Not G-d forbid host websites and visit them, read what others have to say, see culture and history of something real.
Guys I don’t think they read the article
They did. They are not obligated by any rule to limit their associations like some dumb apes do
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 www.bankotamerica.com/…/login_portal.asp?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.
Yes that’s what the article said.
Yeah, but in many, many more words than necessary to be honest.
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.
I don’t remember that episode, but that’s a good pull. I imagine coach did not understand.
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.”
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.
I love Home Movies
It’s still out there. Watching. Waiting. Uh… Winking?
Oh thank god that last word was “winking.”
Wanking
THATS THE WORD I DIDNT WANT. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!1!!
😈
Wonmiserating?
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.
Ideally you want to do one or the other unless you really like the redirect loop error page in your browser.
I’m a rebel. And that’s my security plan.
Security by
obscurityinfinite redirectionI’m still hopeful that gopher makes a comeback.
Archie and Veronica.
I’ve never used Gopher, but what do you think of Gemini?
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
They even don’t support HTTPS on the older articles for that authentic 2009 internet
Plus domains should’ve gone left to right in terms of root, tld, domain, subdomain, etc., instead of right to left.
It annoys me how www. is pronounced in english. Really, double-u double-u double-u dot example dot com?
How else would you say it?
“Wwwwuuuuhh dot Google dot com”?
Edit: or I guess, “world wide web” would make more sense?
“web” would have sounded nice and clear, we also didn’t name FTP the World Wide File Transfer Protocol (WWFTP).
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 😅
“Wuh-wuh-wuh”, using pronunciation similar to the start of “wow” or “woman”
I’ve heard “dub-dub-dub”. But yeah, saying the abbreviation is longer than the words it’s abbreviating! 😀
Same thing in French. Doublevédoublevédoublevé. So. long.
My favorite part of watching WWE is the way their main commentator says “WWE”. You can tell he savors every syllable of it
i like how saying “word wide web” is faster than saying “www”
The article seems to not understand the difference between a subdomain and a name.
No pont in reading.
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.
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:
The
meregistrar 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.
Some websites still require you to type www. explicitly.
For example, my university… Try tu-darmstadt.de and then try www.tu-darmstadt.de
I find that annoying because I’m lazy 😂
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.
I am a dev, and it makes me think whoever is in charge is extremely incompetent.
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
If you’re in charge of running a live environment and running it like it’s still the 90s, then you’re incompetent.
Try going to www.lemmy.world
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.
Just like how back in the earlier days, you didn’t necessarily have to type “http://” before the www.
In the earliest days you absolutely did, it became optional later; especially once gopher:// stopped being a thing
Any old slashdotters remember tcwww, The Cursed www? Just me?
Its a subdomain you have to make sure you point to your main domain at your domain registar
It never got over you