: What does WWW do? To be clear: I am not asking whether or not I should use www in my url, or what the pros and cons are, that topic is well covered. I also wasn't sure if this was a

@Gretchen104

Posted in: #Http #NoWww #Url

To be clear: I am not asking whether or not I should use www in my url, or what the pros and cons are, that topic is well covered. I also wasn't sure if this was a Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Webmaster's question - migration to a more appropriate channel is quite welcome.



Background: I was recently asked to convert a site's urls to all use www, as in example.com to www.example.com. The reason for the request is over my head. I present an excerpt from the email:


Got an issue,

Apparently whenever the site was originally setup with their network (prior
to me), the installers chose to use the internal domain as 'example.com' ...
not good ...

This is a problem trying to resolve externally .... I looked at a few
qweb page source coding and saw many links are coded as
'http:example.comPAGE.XXX' ...

Can it possibly globally be changed from 'http:example.com' to 'http:www.example.com'

I can resolve www, but once I hit a link it thinks the server is the
internal EXAMPLE which houses the domain 'example.com' ...


Something to do with the client not being able to access the website on their own network. As I mentioned, I don't quite understand it.

So, I implemented the change, but while testing, I accidentally typed in an extra w, and to my surprise - the site still worked.

Then I tried several w's, then two, then I typed in some nonsense and the site still worked.

EDIT: To be more accurate, only alpha, numeric, dash, and underscore characters will resolve, anything else returns a Server not found error in the browser.

I just tested this on Stack Overflow and got redirected when I used www, while everything else returned a "Server not found" error.

Does anyone have any insight into what the point of this email request is, and why the accidents and experiments I mentioned worked?

I can certainly provide more information, I'm just not sure what would be relevant.

Vote Up Vote Down

Login to post a comment!