https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www en a blog about Debian and self-hosting Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:13:00 +0000 PluXml https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1335165229-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1335165229-1 Hello, I used to believe that all the websites online began with the prefix "www". I'm glad to learn more about this subject though it's still a bit too technical for me. Thank you for sharing this! Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:13:00 +0000 Antoun Sehnaoui https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334620451-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334620451-1 There are several issues involved. I can see your argument for having www prefix for consistency with other services, i.e. pop, imap, etc. Here's a question however: How many times a day do you enter pop/imap/ns1/whatever into your email client, network setup, etc. I'll answer that for you: none. You've entered them once and they're static. Here's another quesion: How many websites do you visit daily? Probably dozens. Entering "www.", four unnecessay characters, for every single one of them, every day? Too much time wasted if you ask me. Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:54:00 +0000 rjc https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334607285-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334607285-1 I just hate it, when websites are not accessible without the "www". twitter makes it right by completely getting rid of it. How much time is wasted every day by people typing "www"? Must be worth millions. (I see this from a user's standpoint obviously.) Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:14:00 +0000 Quimby https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334563687-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334563687-1 @mirabilos : Wow, that is what I call argumenting… Sorry if I do not consider your comment worth taking into account. Now, since at least I, for one, am capable of argumenting, I can explain a bit. For me, a CNAME is like a symlink in a file system: a good way to make an entity available with several names, while keeping one of these names as the canonical one which is refered to by the symbolic ones. This is essential for coherence and manageability, but it comes with a cost: it doubles the initial time to resolve a symbolic name, although it changes nothing most of the time thanks to caching. Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:08:00 +0000 Tanguy https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334504164-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334504164-1 CNAME considered harmful. Do not use it. Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:36:00 +0000 mirabilos https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334299504-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334299504-1 @Iñigo : That kind of high availability is useful, but is still a workaround. With services with an up-to-date design such as SMTP or XMPP, anyone can very easily implement a complete fail-over service. With the antiquated design of HTTP, the lack of such a mechanism can be worked around, but only partially: since it uses a single IP address (one can have serveral AAAA or A records, but this is for load balancing, not for fail-over) it will always have a single point of failure, usually the Internet service provider, or the BGP service for fortunate people that can have their own AS. @calestyo : Yes, that is true, with only one server there is no technical reason for using a prefix… until you choose to use an additional server and have to move all that to using a prefix. And even with one server, it still allows for a cleaner DNS zone, with each service referencing the canonical name of the (possibly single) server implementing it. Fri, 13 Apr 2012 06:45:00 +0000 Tanguy https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334278771-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334278771-1 Obligatory: http://no-www.org/ Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:59:00 +0000 www.www.www.com.com.com https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334276396-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article47/why-www/#c1334276396-1 There's not really much reason in using subdomains like www/ftp etc. if there's only on server in a domain (or if the respective daemons run on one server). To differenciate between services, you have port numbers on TCP/UDP level and schemas on URI level. Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:19:00 +0000 calestyo