Why WWW in URL?

[debiprasad_sahoo]

It is not always needed to put www. in the url. www. is just like other sub domains which can be configured in DNS. Means if you want to serve different sites for www.yoururl.com and yoururl.com you can configure this in DNS.
But when the WWW started, people append www. in their url.
I want to know why those god fathers appended www. to the url? Can't it done only with the url?

[aditya.shevade]

to indicate that the web was world wide?

[Cool G5]

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/www.html

[Gigacore]

Standards.

But now you dont need to enter www in the address bar of ur browser. If the domain ends with .com , then you dont need to type even .com just type the website name in the address bar and hit CTRL + ENTER will take u to the homepage. For instance 'google' will take u to www.google.com

[redhat]

the WWW comes coz some sites r country specific...
In some sites, try appending d WWW, n they wont launch, dont know much about this matter though...

[slugger]

Originally Posted by redhat

the WWW comes coz some sites r country specific...
In some sites, try appending d WWW, n they wont launch, dont know much about this matter though...

d www has got nothing to do any country or tehsil

www.example.com is just a subdomain of example.com

if you choose not to create the subdomain, nothing will launch when you add www to the address

[DigitalDude]

webmasters can define how their sites need to appear in google.. there is an option of specifying if we need www or not.. its mostly a personal preference but there is also something more to it.. also pagerank was diff for site name with www and without www

I use the www with a few of my sites and dont use it with others.. the target audience for your site also come into consideration to make this decision (if you say somename.com everyone instantly recognise its a website but a lot of internet illiterate people cant recognise other tlds like say .in .us etc so a www before the name will give the internet identity in this case). anyway I will always redirect to the preferred name if some other name is typed... like a redirect to site without the www if you typed www in the address bar.. for eg. try visiting www.wordpress.com it will redirect you to wordpress.com

nowadays the www is not required as everyone know quite a lot about the internet but still many websites use www cos of using it for such a long time and also there is no real need for not using www

a lot of it is assumption


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