Re: why www?

Brandon Gillespie ([email protected])
Wed, 13 Dec 1995 11:31:24 +0000 ()


On Wed, 13 Dec 1995, Ray Stell wrote:

> I guess I am missing something, but why do urls generally
> contain the string www?
>
> How doe the string help? I don't see it. I would
> think it rare that a url would be used without http://
> up front, so where is the functionality of www?
> Isn't http://www.whatever sort of like the Department of
> Redundancy Department?

Because 'www' is not a part of the protocol, it is the name of the
machine. 'www' could as easilly be 'fred.whatever.com', where 'fred' is
the name of the machine within 'whatever.com' domain. However, it became
an unrecognized standard to name web machines 'www'. Somebody could just
as easilly make the machine answer to 'whatever.com'.

-Brandon Gillespie-