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Have you ever pondered about the “www.” prefix you type when you go to most websites ?

For some time I was sure that it’s actually the root of The Internet, the address of all addresses, the “Earth” of snail-mail addresses.

Later on I just stopped caring and assumed it was a mandatory part of the address like “http://” (I’m not going to recurse on the meaning of that, yet) which most browsers append if you forget, or like me, just plain too lazy to type.

That idea changed a little when I saw sites starting with www2.something.com, and I thought to myself – “Ha ? A second internet ? Is that where all the cool stuff go ? Or is that the Web 2.0 hype everyone is talking about ?”. But as with most random thoughts that blur through my head, a whole 20 picoseconds later I forgot all about it and moved on.

Today I was confronted head on with the true meaning of WWW, and I don’t mean the “It stands for World Wide Web” thing, but the reason it’s there.
While setting up a sub domain in gpgemini.com to redirect gpgemini.tumblr.com to zero.gpgemini.com for the Division By Zero blog, I was asked by the tumblr help page to set my domain’s A Record to their IP address.
Without a glimpse of an idea what that’s all about, I carried on.
Then I noticed at the very bottom of the page the following note:

We also fully support custom domains with a sub-domain other than "www". So you can use a domain like "blog.mywebsite.com" if you’d like.

My first reaction to this was - “WHAT ?”
”www.” is just another sub domain ? That is ALL ? What about the World Wide Web stuff, the Entire Internet ?
With hands shaking and cold sweat pouring I search “www” in Google…
After realizing that’s stupid, I search “wiki www” in Google,  get here and read the following:

The letters "www" are commonly found at the beginning of Web addresses because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) … This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; … The "www" prefix has no meaning in the way the main Web site is shown"

World shattered and all I continue reading and find this little note:

However, some website addresses require the www. prefix, and if typed without one, won’t work; there are also some which must be typed without the prefix. Sites that do not have Host Headers properly setup are the cause of this. Some hosting companies do not set up a www or @ A record in the web server configuration and/or at the DNS server level.

And I think – Did I set my A Record right ? I take a look and I notice that my main domain is setup – “*.gpgemini.com” and “gpgemini.com” pointing to some address, but my new sub domain has only “zero.gpgemini.com” pointing to the tumblr address. So should you try to enter www.zero.gpgemini.com it wouldn’t work since I don’t have the “www” sub domain defined for it.
Now I do anyway, and my site is www-friendly.

Here is one more thing wiki had to say about www:

World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.

– Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

Tags: division by zero

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.