I am born in 1999, I remember having to write “www.” before my website in the address bar otherwise it would not work. Later in elementary school it no longer needed to be done to access the website. What happened?
In: Technology
In the early days of the Internet, it wasn’t so clear yet, what everyone was going to use it for. Around the end of the 90s/start of the 00s, it was starting to become pretty clear that web browsers and web pages were going to be how most people and businesses used the internet, most of the time.
If you’re going to run an internet domain, there are a bunch of different services you can host on it though. You can host a web page, an email server, an FTP server, a Gopher server, or countless other things. Traditionally, you would host each of these things on a separate subdomain of your main domain: www.something.com for your website, ftp.something.com for file transfers, mail.something.com for an SMTP server, and stuff like that. And sometimes, each of those services would be hosted by a different physical server on a different IP address. Often there would be a forwarder so that if you went to something.com you would be bounced to www.something.com, but that was an extra step to set up.
As things developed (and as the IPv4 address pool dried up), it became much more common to use virtual hosting, reverse-proxies and similar systems so all these services would appear to be hosted on a single system, which makes it simpler to just create a something.com domain and host all the services on that one address.
Businesses were also starting to decide arpound the same time that leaving the “www” out of their website domain made for better branding.
Because web browsers now add “www” automatically. Sometimes, you can replace “www” with something else to access a different thing, for example, if you use old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com, you will get redirected to the older style interface.
They are called i-rules or wild cards in dns names.
Basically you are routing any c-name to the root domain. So www.domain.com and domain.com and reddit.domain.com all go to the same place. You can then subdivide the domain as you see fit.
For many sites, the www still works, but it is basically redundant. If every site needs it, then no site needs it.
This is about the Domain Name System. This is what translates “reddit.com” into an IP address that a computer can use to actually understand and route, sort of like a phone book translating a business name into a phone number.
Back in the old days, you just had a record for “a.b.c” = 10.11.12.13. That worked great originally when you would just setup a server with a web server and mail server and everything you needed. However, eventually we wanted to start putting the mail server on a separate box that would be dedicated to it.
But now here’s the problem. If you email [email protected], that message is going to go to the server that `example.com` represents. That means you need to specifically route `example.com` to the mail server to keep it working. If you want the web server separate, you need to distinguish it. That’s where the `www` comes in. It gives you a separate address that you can point to the web server and have everything work.
There was an invention that helped in the 90s with this — the MX record. Basically, the DNS protocol allowed you to specifically request the Mail Server for a given address. This is what is used all the time today. It did take some time to roll out though, so many websites still had to have their main `example.com` domain point to a mail server, and maybe had a small web server on the same box that redirected to `www`. It’s the equivalent to having a phone book listing for a business having separate numbers for different departments.
Sites need to be set up to have a record for the non-`www` name to work. Forgetting to set one up would be an easy mistake to make, especially with typing `www` being so common. Both the web server itself and the name records (via DNS) need to be present. Arguably it’s the user’s fault for not typing the correct name, as the historical standard has been to use names in the general form “`servicetype.companyname.com`”, and you didn’t specify what service type you wanted.
Today, nothing has really changed technically, beyond how popular web browsers are for doing… everything. The web browser is how we interact with the internet in most situations, so the convention has bled into assuming that if no service is typed then the user wants `www`. It’s not a user mistake to leave it out, it’s the server’s mistake for not handling it if the user doesn’t type it.
I could totally make a web site that requires you to type the `www.` bit on the URL. But if I’m a business and customers are having a harder time finding my web site, that’s my problem.
Think of the folders in your hard drive. Think specifically of the “Documents” folder. Now imagine if all the web sites were stored in “Documents” folder.
If you wanted to go to reddit then you’d enter the URL “Documents.reddit.com”, because that’s where all the reddit content is on the computer running the reddit web server.
Everyone is basically in agreement that they should put all their web content in the “Documents” folder. Then when people want to go to reddit.com, they include it in the URL.
But we can make it easier for people to access reddit in two ways.
1. You just type reddit.com and reddit’s computers know to take you to the documents folder to access the web content.
2. The web browser can simply append “Documents” before reddit.com.
For the most part web servers now just redirect your browser to the place where they have stored web content. There are still some websites where you have to include “www” as most browsers no longer add it automatically.
a web address goes <servername>.<domainname>.<extension>
if you just do [google.com](https://google.com) then the dns for [google.com](https://google.com) needs to redirect it go a server or else it goes nowhere. by default it goes to the www server. back when the internet was new, it was just convention to do it “properly” by putting [www](http://www). nowadays, if you just type [domainname.com](https://domainname.com) it by default goes to www (but not always), depends how the dns is setup for it.
Almost every answer on here is wrong for some reason, so here’s my take: originally, the WWW was to specify that it was a user accessible web page on that domain, as opposed to something used for a backend also hosted on Google.com, for example. Here’s how web addresses work: they go backwards. You can think of .com as a folder, with domains in it like Google.com and reddit.com. then, inside those lie more specific servers, like classroom.google.com or sites.google.com. At some point, it became less necessary to have your website on the www portion of your domain, and some websites just host it on the domain name itself (Twitter, for example). Checking which one a specific web page uses is handled by your browser, which redirects you to the correct address if you forgot the www (but not the other way around, at least sometimes)
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