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?

[whabang]

Basically, the web browsers have stopped to try adding www. in front of addresses they can't find.

[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?

[persia]

People may be getting lazy with their A records.

[Oliver]

Matt_H wrote:
You sure it's an end-user software thing?...

I have been told that addresses are often listed in both forms, but not always. I do not think it is an issue with the client software. I have no direct experience with this though, and it has been a while since I dealt with this sort of thing professionally.

[uncharted]

That is strange.  There was a thread on another forum I frequent about a week or so ago that was observing the opposite, that many places were now ignoring the www. part as many now see it as redundant. The reasoning was that it's likely that it'll be a website at the other end of an HTTP server so why bother marking it as such.

I wonder which way around it is, I can't say I've noticed it one way or another.

[persia]

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?

[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?

[persia]

When I setup my domains the "@" record always points to the ip address that hosts the domain.  So say you were using Godaddy, I wouldn't by say you were.  The A record would read something like
@, 68.178.232.100, 1hr

The @ means the domain itself.

Then I would set up a cname like this
www,@, 1hr

That means the alias www points to the A record, it's an alias for my site without the www.  Skip this step and the www points absolutely nowhere.

Now suppose I did something really funky and pointed the www to somewhere else, then it might work until that somewhere else stopped working.  This could simply be that you were developing in a subfolder and forgot to redirect www to the new site.  Happens all the time...

[roanen]

I have been noticing the www is not always mandatory myself.
Didn't put much to it though. Just continued on with my search.