Where has the "www." gone?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s still there, you just don’t need it since it’s usually a given. Like how you didn’t need to actually type out “http://” back in the day.

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- jasoman@lemmy.world ⁨48⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  I am upset only by “back in the day.”.
  
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  - Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨32⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO…
    
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ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
There’s two things at play here.

First, www originated in a time when the web was not synonymous with the internet. Gopher, FTP etc were a much larger part of peoples daily internet usage, and servers would have different subdomain names to account for that. ftp.tld.edu, gopher.tld.edu and www.tld.edu were all domains you might see for a single server for example. Then of course, the web grew, and the other protocols became less relevant, but the www stuck around. One of the reasons you’re seeing less of it, is because that tradition is slowly fading away given its loss of daily relevance.

The other reason you’re seeing less of it is that browsers often just hide it even when it’s there. And that of course, will create more future instances of servers just dropping it completely.

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- pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Nowdays ftp-things are like ftp:// and normal websites use https://, is this a newer thing?
  
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  - heartSagan5@lemmy.zip ⁨46⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Okay. ftp://, http://, https:// are associate with protocols that operate on a common port. You can execute “cat /etc/protocol” (on macOS or Linux terminal) and see each associate common port and their protocol name.
    
    The protocol is associated with a port that is open on a host, which is associated with a process in the OS and that process listens and “talks” those ways when a host connects with a client, like a web browser.
    
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  - adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    No — that prefix tells the OS which application to direct the address to.
    
    The www., ftp., mail., etc. are on the server side, so the client gets directed to the correct computer owned by the domain owner.
    
    To some degree, this quickly became irrelevant when virtual hosting became a thing; you could have something watching on the server side that would see an attempt to connect to port 80 or port 443, check the domain the client is looking for, and redirect them to the right internal or external IP address.
    
    With the onset of CDNs, it became even less meaningful since load and availability balancers will now decide what computer will eventually receive the request.
    
    All you really need is the URI (https://) and the port (:443) and everything else can be a black box.
    
    Why don’t we see :80 and :443 on URLs anymore? Because a web browser, when it handles the URI request, auto-maps to the default ports for that URI unless it is explicitly told to use another.
    
    As a result, you can enter example.com into a browser address bar, and you’ll automatically be taken to guest@www.example.com but all you’ll see on the browser bar is example.com.
    
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  - Dultas@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Those are schemes and they are not new, there are many others as well. Some you may see in a browser are http, mailto, file. Others that you won’t typically see in browsers include ldap(s), imap, jdbc, odbc, etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_URI_schemes
    
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  - NABDad@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Newer, yes. Not very new.
    
    The URL format of protocol://hostname.domain:port/path was defined in 1994. Prior to that you would use use an ftp client, usually on the command line like:
    
    ftp hostname.domain
    
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heartSagan5@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
It’s been “hidden” since Chrome v95 or something. Also, many companies might just host their web service on their main domain name.

Also, hit Ctrl+Enter in any browser and it’ll tack that right on it and goto the webpage or hit a redirect or 5…whatever their architect setup.

google.com may be a CNAME to www.google.com (for example).

The www (or whatever hostname) is just to balance the web traffic from the other Internet services, like SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP, etc.

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Eat_Your_Paisley@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I know its not necessary but I still type it because I’m old and have muscle memory

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- heartSagan5@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  Here, hit Ctrl+Enter…after Google and it’ll pop it right in there.
  
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celia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The company owns the “example.com” domain name and can put what they want before it. The “www.” part (which stands for World Wide Web) was a convention for the company to put their website on, as other subdomains may be used for other services than websites. As time went on, companies started to make the “example.com” itself point to the website as it is shorter and easier to type/remember, and made the “www.example.com” redirect you to “example.com” for retrocompatibility

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p_consti@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
In addition to all the good answers, there also the case that most browsers just hide it nowadays. Go to google.com, you’ll see only that text in the URL field, the http(s)://www part is only shown when you click into the field, because as many have already said, it’s redundant in today’s infrastructure

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albbi@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
www. plays in my head a fair bit. It’s that song that has the ICQ Uh Oh sound in it.

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- Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Never heard this one before, but I clicked it just to hear the uh oh.
  
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TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
because it used to be necessarily, and it ICANN reformed stuff year ago, so now it’s not.

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- stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  IT guy here, I can’t believe it was ever technically necessary, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a best practice published by ICANN.
  
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  - AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    browsers didn’t auto-complete it like they do now, so it was necessary for users to type it.
    
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marcos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That “www” is the name of the computer. It used to be that people liked to have a different computer just doing web stuff.

Nowadays you don’t need to put the computer name on the address to send the web connections to it. But also, almost everybody hacks their network so that any computer can answer to any name they want. So people normalized not naming an specific computer to answer.

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- SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  Well it’s a subdomain. You could have www.example.com and ftp.example.com go to the same computer, or you could have a load balancer direct www to multiple computers. But it’s helpful for keeping stuff organized in your configuration to give them different names based on what kind of content and/or protocol they’re serving out.
  
  Google does a pretty good job at this where it’s mail.google.com for gmail, www.google.com for their search, and if you’re logging into any google account, it’s something like accounts.google.com. That way you know which company you’re exchanging information with from the domain name, and the subdomain tells you which service you’re using. Helpful if you want to make sure it’s not a phishing site.
  
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