Go in then Web Yodas. Why does Singetrack world not have a www. between the http bit and the site name?

Oh yeah! Never noticed. That’s my something new learned today.

Can now close my mind to all new input 8)

Basically because you don’t have to. It’s down to the local admin to define. Could be single.track.world.com if they wanted it to be.

Yes, you don’t need to. What you DO need to do (and STW do this) is to redirect the www to the main hostname. So many websites don’t direct www to the domain or vice versa, you wonder what is wrong with their tech staff.

redirect the www to the main hostname. So many websites don’t direct www to the domain or vice versa, you wonder what is wrong with their tech staff.

Erm. Well that cleared it up no end for me. Thanks. ❓ 😀

Because it’s not really required and is a bit dated. You remember the early days of the web when people used to read out all the “http://www.” stuff a character at a time ? The “brand” singletrackworld now requires less guff to be entered in a browser to access the content.

So why don’t all websites do without the ‘www’? And what’s the whole ‘redirect to the host name’ thing?

Could be single.track.world.com if they wanted it to be.

That would resolve to the ‘world’.com domain name or a ‘track.world’.com subdomain if it exists.

Back when the web was created www were the characters you would prepend to a url to signify it’s the web page that you requested and not for instance their file server, which would be ftp, or some other area of the website that you wanted.

Nowadays, it’s assumed that the default thing you are requesting is the web page, hence you no longer (not always, but in 99% of cases) need to put www in front of the url.

Many have built their brand on www. as part of the name. Also some might have lots of other subdomains, e.g. mail. (email server), ftp. (file downloads). Or they could be a multinational using a single domain with cournty some domains. http://www.company.com being the global site then uk.company, us.company.com, de.company.com etc for country sites.

Or they just could be stuck in the mud.

You can type www if you like. It just redirects to the one without. Many browsers these days will attempt to add www if you don’t supply it and the server doesn’t respond to no www.

www is just a convention for sub domain naming. Was to distinguish the web server from other servers on the same domain.

Still think this new fangled www stuff is rubbish though. We should go back to Gopher.

enbern and nixie – those explanations make sense. Ta.

Yep, thanks for those! 🙂

Because it’s not really required and is a bit dated. You remember the early days of the web when people used to read out all the “http://www.” stuff a character at a time ? The “brand” singletrackworld now requires less guff to be entered in a browser to access the content.

Except, you can omit the http bit and a modern browser will work it out, but the www portion of the URL is part of the address and is reliant on the server end responding sensibly. (A browser can readily guess, but it shouldn’t have to.)

In most URLs, the first ‘word’ is the name of the website. Conventionally this is “www” but there’s no real reason for this other than habit. You could call it “web” or “forums” or “Brian” for the difference it makes. Historically these would probably have been separate physical web servers, but a modern web server will typically host any number of sites and look at the requested name to serve up the correct one.

So, STW’s web server appears to be configured to respond to two hostnames; “www.” and a blank hostname. The www. address looks to then redirect to the blank site. Why? Who knows, “why not” may well be the answer. As ATP says, it’s not really needed unless you’re hosting multiple sites under one domain (eg, if STW wanted to have http://www.singletrackworld.com, forums.singletrackworld.com, gritcx.singletrackworld.com etc.)

An interesting campaign: www. is deprecated http://no-www.org/