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
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.
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