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Comment on Why dont we say "WWW" in front of website URLs anymore?

Originally, companies had a much simpler infrastructure and the prefix before a server let you know what sort of server was. So you can imagine something like this:

-mail.microsoft.com -ftp.microsoft.com -irc.microsoft.com -print.microsoft.com

These sorts of services would have been in existence long before the world wide web became commonly used. When it started out, it was logical to put “www” in front of the server name.

Now, DNS is largely used for this purpose. You put “microsoft.com” in your browser and it resolves, and is sent to MSFT. The servers on that end detect what sort of connection it is from the port number used and other methods, then forward your request to the appropriate server automatically. Any variation of it will go to the same place: -https://microsoft.com/ -https://www.microsoft.com/ -http://microsoft.com/ -microsoft.com -etc.

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nous@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Now, DNS is largely used for this purpose.

Um, that does not really make sense.

-mail.microsoft.com -ftp.microsoft.com -irc.microsoft.com -print.microsoft.com

These are all domain names and DNS servers are used to resolve these to different IPs. Always has done that job and still does it today. But microsoft.com is a single domain name and DNS can only resolve it to a single address (or set of addresses). So cannot be used to tell different services apart.

DNS does not know anything about http or https or any other protocal like that. It just resolves the domain name to an IP/set of IPs. The only thing it can do is point www.microsoft.com and microsoft.com to the same location so that you can use either to get to the webservers.

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- BassTurd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  The person you responded to did say that DNS will get to the correct place, and then other servers will route the traffic using ports and other information. They were a little too strong in that first sentence that now DNS does it, but they did clarify some.
  
  DNS doesn’t do the full thing, but it does do the first step.
  
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  - stoly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    It was also meant to be a simple answer rather than a deeply technical one.
    
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- daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  These are all domain names and DNS servers are used to resolve these to different IPs.
  
  These are all subdomain names. And subdomains can point to a different IP, or they can point to the same IP. They can also use a CNAME record to point to another [sub]domain name, and it’s probably most common to have an A record on the main domain with the IP and just use a CNAME on the www subdomain so that it always points to the same place the main domain points.
  
  DNS does not know anything about http or https or any other protocal like that. It just resolves the domain name to an IP/set of IPs. The only thing it can do is point www.microsoft.com and microsoft.com to the same location so that you can use either to get to the webservers.
  
  CNAME is the record that is used to point e.g. www.microsoft.com to microsoft.com. They could use an A record for www.microsoft.com and use the same IP as the A record for microsoft.com, which would accomplish the same thing, but would have to be updated when the IP for microsoft.com changes.
  
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- stoly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  The goal was simplicity, not accuracy. To give the “gist” of it to someone who does not know much about technology.
  
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