An observation about the WWW

[Matt_H]

As I recall from the past, I could typically visit URLs in my browser by simply entering genericwebsite.com.

More recently, though, say in the past year or two, it seems like the www. prefix is required for more and more addresses. And this isn't just for bizarre four-visitors-per-year websites - http://harvard.edu will fail, but http://www.harvard.edu works fine.

Has something changed with new versions of big HTTP server software, or are some IT people just doing something stupid?

Or am I just completely misremembering how the web works?

[Matt_H]

You sure it's an end-user software thing? This issue seems to occur both on Firefox 3 and the time-capsuled IBrowse 2.4, if not other browsers.

Would www. auto-prefixing really have been removed from the last IBrowse release?

EDIT: And why would browser authors think this was a Good Idea?

[Matt_H]

persia wrote:
When you set up the A records on your domain you can choose to set up any number of subdomains, including www.  Haven't any of you set up your own domains?

Nope, I haven't, but yours sounds like the best theory so far.

In other examples of this happening, the root domain.com directs to an error page or some other sort of useless server-side message.

So it looks like people are failing to redirect HTTP traffic from, for example, genericdomain.com to www.genericdomain.com. Is that what you're saying?