"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                    September 2000

In this issue: "Is a WWW necessary in your web address?
If not, why is it used? For what purpose?"


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New clients frequently express concern when we set them up
with a web address that is not preceded by 'www', and there
is a considerable confusion surrounding the use and necssity
of this prefix. Here I'll try to explain the origin and
use of these letters.

First you need to understand the structure of a web address.
If you have one of the form aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd, it represents
parts of a machine's address, separated by the dots. Here,
'aaa' is the name of a machine on a network, 'bbb' is the name
of the particular sub-network it's connected to, 'ccc' is the
name of the larger network it's a member of, and 'ddd' is the
name of the main segment of the internet, such as '.com', or
'.edu'. There will always be a machine and at least one
network component, but there may be more or less subnetworks
involved in the address.

Once upon a time when the net was young, only large university
computer centers had experimental web servers. These web
servers were always given an entire machine to themselves so
that they could be experimented upon without disrupting
anything else. That machine was by custom given the name "WWW"
so that anyone looking for a web server to connect to at that
location could easily guess the address of the machine that
housed it.

That meant that the address of the web server was
www.thedomain.edu, so all you had to do was address that
machine and try to connect to port 80 which is the port the
web server answers when someone knocks. If the web server had
been housed on a machine named "Fred" then it would have
answered the door at fred.thedomain.edu, but they didn't do
that.

Now most places don't have more than one machine on the
internet, so the third level of address doesn't exist and
everything they have, including the web server, is on the
machine named thedomain.edu or thedomain.com or whatever. So,
unless you happen to be running a bunch of machines at the
same site and it happens that one of them is named www and it
happens that that's the machine that your web server is
running on, then putting www in front of your domain name is
absolutely meaningless. In fact, it's an incorrect address,
and other things being equal would get you exactly nowhere.

However....after a while AOL and other private networks began
permitting their members to connect through to the
Internet. Their captive audiences of newbies flooded out and
saw web sites all over the place named www.something.edu and
they all wanted one too, so they went out and registered
things called www.mypage.com, just like the big guys. Then,
since they didn't have any machines of their own, let alone
three levels of network worth of computer centers, and were
all using virtual accounts on commercial hosting services, the
commercial hosting services just set their machines to ignore
the www and point incoming requests to the correct account
anyway.

Unfortunately however it does matter to the domain name
servers that look up addresses because they have no way of
knowing what the real situation is at your computer farm. That
meant that whoever had registered a domain with a www in front
of it could not be found unless people actually entered the
www.

That led to lots of confusion as to whether the www was or
wasn't really a part of any particular domain. The browser
makers therefore just made the browser try it with a www if it
couldn't find it without. So, today you'll get there
regardless, but putting the www in just takes longer to type.

The registrars now either quietly ignore the www when
requested, or else put a www as part of the line ahead of the
domain name entry area so that people wont put it in. So
eventually there won't be any more www names except for those
few archealogical instances where there really is a machine
named www housing the web server somewhere. There may not be
any left now, but who knows. There are also still a number 
of older sites around that managed to actually register the 
www as part of their domain names, albeit incorrectly.

It will probably take much longer to erase the www from
popular usage than from the internet however; it's firmly
ingrained in the popular consciousness and since it seems
to work, people will go on assuming it has a function.

So the bottom line is yes, your URL is correct without
the www.

Best,

Jamie

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