What Happened To WWW.?

Originally the idea was that you would have a domain and then have a host under that domain for each service (e.g. mail.example.net, ftp.example.net, www.example.net,...). Of course eventually the web was used by a lot more people this directly than any other service so the main domain was also configured to point at the web server and then people added a redirect either in one direction (add www.) or the other (remove www.) on the first request.

The final piece is that often each of those services would be on a different computer entirely, each with a different public IP address. Otherwise the port is sufficient to sperate most services on a common domain.
There was a good long while where IP addresses were still unutilized enough that there was no reason to even try being conservative.
- Originally there also wasn't any name-based virtual hosting, especially in SSL/TLS-based services like HTTPS so you needed one IP per name if you wanted to host multiple websites.
  And part of the disappearance of www. now is probably that strange decision by Chrome to hide it.
Well also at one point www.domain.com may have actually been a single physical server. That hasn't been true for sites of any size in a long time.
Yes that's what the article said.
- Yeah, but in many, many more words than necessary to be honest.

It's still out there. Watching. Waiting. Uh... Winking?

There's a whole ass Home Movies episode where they keep saying "you don't have to say www" in reference to how ubiquitous the web had become that you could talk about a website without needing to reference the www prefix.

That was over 20 years ago.

I don't remember that episode, but that's a good pull. I imagine coach did not understand.
- Pretty sure it's a different episode, but there's a credits joke of Coach registering "fenton's naked mom dot com." From Season 3, episode 1 "Shore Leave."
  https://fentonsnakedmom.com/
  ~~I'm having trouble finding the "you don't have to say www" episode and I'm not gonna rewatch a bunch of every episode to find it right now ha.~~
  Actually, nevermind, just found it. Season 4, episode 1 "Everybody's Entitled to My Opinion." The episode starts with this discussion about the www.
and then I sign it "Movie Guy"
is Movie Guy your pseudonym?
no it's just a name I use instead of my real name
I love Home Movies

Some websites still require you to type www. explicitly.

For example, my university… Try https://tu-darmstadt.de/ and then try https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/

I find that annoying because I’m lazy 😂

That's a 5-minute workaround in the server config. Hate it when idiots skip that. I'm no dev, but I've done it many times.
- I am a dev, and it makes me think whoever is in charge is extremely incompetent.
www is just a host name, totally arbitrary.
I prefer it, so I just redirect HTTP requests my root domain to the www version. I think it makes a ton of sense, since I www is merely one of the many services I host at my domain.
When I was in school it was just when all this was starting and people were starting to get used to the internet. There are a lot of websites they thought were inappropriate for children to look at (mostly they were harmless). Anyway if you didn't enter www. in front of the web address, it bypassed all of the site block filters.
When I was in school it was just when all this was starting and people were starting to get used to the internet. There are a lot of websites they thought were inappropriate for children to look at (mostly they were harmless). Anyway if you didn't enter www. in front of the web address, it bypassed all of the site block filters.

I'm still hopeful that gopher makes a comeback.

Archie and Veronica.
I've never used Gopher, but what do you think of Gemini?

Its a subdomain you have to make sure you point to your main domain at your domain registar

Also tangentially related: one of Tim Berners-Lee's regrets is the two forward slashes between the protocol scheme and the domain name

Also I love that the older BBC articles are frozen in time like this

They even don't support HTTPS on the older articles for that authentic 2009 internet
Plus domains should've gone left to right in terms of root, tld, domain, subdomain, etc., instead of right to left.

Any old slashdotters remember tcwww, The Cursed www? Just me?

It's easy to redirect a domain such as "archive.org" to "www.archive.org" and vice versa. Just a line in your webserver config. Or just serve it directly from the former.

Ideally you want to do one or the other unless you really like the redirect loop error page in your browser.
- I'm a rebel. And that's my security plan.
- Security by ~~obscurity~~ infinite redirection

It annoys me how www. is pronounced in english. Really, double-u double-u double-u dot example dot com?

How else would you say it?
"Wwwwuuuuhh dot Google dot com"?
Edit: or I guess, "world wide web" would make more sense?
- In other languages, German for instance, it's pronounced kinda like "weh" or like the letter V in English. It's easier to say that way. Back in the day I sometimes said "triple double u" to not have to say it the actual, complicated way 😅
- "Wuh-wuh-wuh", using pronunciation similar to the start of "wow" or "woman"
- "web" would have sounded nice and clear, we also didn't name FTP the World Wide File Transfer Protocol (WWFTP).
- I've heard "dub-dub-dub". But yeah, saying the abbreviation is longer than the words it's abbreviating! 😀
Same thing in French. Doublevédoublevédoublevé. So. long.

It never got over you

Just like how back in the earlier days, you didn't necessarily have to type "http://" before the www.

In the earliest days you absolutely did, it became optional later; especially once gopher:// stopped being a thing

It became assumed.

The article seems to not understand the difference between a subdomain and a name.

No pont in reading.

There's no WWW anymore. There's content and there are Internet platforms. You should consume content and and hold your breath for what platforms have for you, as part of a crowd many-many times bigger than the one at Mecca. Not G-d forbid host websites and visit them, read what others have to say, see culture and history of something real.

Guys I don't think they read the article
- They did. They are not obligated by any rule to limit their associations like some dumb apes do