[thelist] www prefix is it necessary?

Scott Dexter dexilalolai at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 24 16:18:07 CST 2005


--- Rich Points <rich at richpoints.com> wrote:
> My question is why is this prefix used if it's not necessary?

Someone already answered this, but I'll reiterate (mostly because I'm
killing a little time before going home. Aren't you kids lucky ;) )

It's a legacy naming convention that turned into everyday language.
As network folks named their servers, it was easy (and logical) to
name them things like mail.company.com for the mail server,
ftp.company.com for ftp, and when http came around, www.company.com
for 'world wide web' was added into the mix. --For some reason
http.company.com never caught on :)

It has become so ubiquitous that people blindly add it on, which is
fun if your company has a URL published as "time.company.com" (for
example) and you get helpdesk calls complaining that the site is
down, only to find out that "www.time.company.com" isn't set up in
DNS. That was always fun....

Hope that helps :)
Scott




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