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ClintonMagus Inner circle Southwestern Southeast 3997 Posts |
Why do web browsers sometimes accept URLs without the "www" in front, but require it at other times?
Things are more like they are today than they've ever been before...
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Kevin Ridgeway V.I.P. Indianapolis, IN & Phoenix, AZ 1832 Posts |
Most sites should be able to be accessed without the www. Some secure sites will require it. It all depends on how the DNS is setup.
About the only sites I come across that require it are some online banking sites. Hope that helps. Kevin
Living Illusions
Ridgeway & Johnson Entertainment Inc Kevin Ridgeway & Kristen Johnson aka Lady Houdini The World's Premier Female Escape Artist www.LadyHoudini.com www.livingillusions.com |
ClintonMagus Inner circle Southwestern Southeast 3997 Posts |
Here's an example - "themagicawards.com" takes me to a Google search page, while "www.themagicawards.com" takes me to the site.
Things are more like they are today than they've ever been before...
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Jaz Inner circle NJ, U.S. 6111 Posts |
I believe that some site hosts will redirect you from http://www.domain.com to domain.com or the opposite and some may not.
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BalukMagic Veteran user Toronto, Canada 319 Posts |
Themagicawards.com works fine for me and redirects to http://www.themagicawards.com
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JoeJoe Inner circle Myrtle Beach 1915 Posts |
Most webhosts setup a domain to work with or without the "www". The "www" was initally used in print advertising so people would realize it was a web address, and generally when it is used the http:// is not included ... thus it is a way to let the reader know it is a URL.
There are probroly a few webhosts left around that do not work with or without the www, but most likely rare today. -JoeJoe
Amazing JoeJoe on YouTube[url=https://www.youtube.com/user/AmazingJoeJoe]
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Dennis Michael Inner circle Southern, NJ 5821 Posts |
Did you know you can mix Capitalization with small letters?
On the Café, you can eliminate the http:// but you must use www. Examples: Domain Name: magicalbirthdayparty.com The following wotks on the URL address Line: MagicalBirthdayParty.com http://www.MagicalBirthdayParty.com http://www.TheMagicAwards.com http://www.JoeJoeOnline.com http://www.MarkBaluk.com http://www.LivingIllusions.com If you try your domain without the www, then on your business card you can just add MyMagicDomain.com it is a lot better than the full URL on the card.
Dennis Michael
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ClintonMagus Inner circle Southwestern Southeast 3997 Posts |
Quote:
On 2007-04-02 22:56, BalukMagic wrote: Maybe it's a browser function or something. This isn't that big a deal; it's just curious how it seems to happen with no rhyme or reason. Kinda like my cursor jumping to random places on the screen when the lowercase "B" is pressed...
Things are more like they are today than they've ever been before...
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Kevin Ridgeway V.I.P. Indianapolis, IN & Phoenix, AZ 1832 Posts |
I tried to explain it guys....it is a DNS setting that the person setting up the site either did or did not do, if it is only that url this is happening with. It is not a browser situation, unless it is doing this for every url you type in.
Kevin
Living Illusions
Ridgeway & Johnson Entertainment Inc Kevin Ridgeway & Kristen Johnson aka Lady Houdini The World's Premier Female Escape Artist www.LadyHoudini.com www.livingillusions.com |
eddwithers New user London 64 Posts |
Its also down to if you have software such as google toolbar installed.
If you do, or if your browser is set up to search google for example, when you type something that isn't immediately recognized as a web address it will search it, or take you straight to the nearest result. For example, if you have google toolbar, typing 'New York Times' in takes you straight to the Times' newspaper. If you don't have that software, it will try it as a web address, and input the missing www. I own www.themagicawards.com, and both themagicawards.com and www.themagicawards.com //Edd
Manager, www.TheMagicWoods.co.uk
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Utkarsh Sinha Regular user Goa, India 137 Posts |
Quote:
On 2007-04-03 10:46, Living Illusions wrote: that's right. When you buy a domain name, you buy anything.com, not www.anything.com. Once you have the domain name, the DNS is used to direct the user to the computer where the website is actually stored (that is, the server). The server "categorises" multiple parts of the website - into subdomains. www is a subdomain. If you visit http://about.com, and visit the various sections there (computing, technology, games, health, etc), you will see that they have hundreds of subdomains. These days, almost all servers have a pre-existing folder named "www" on the server. And when you upload the pages, they automatically reach the www folder. If you upload pages to some other folder, like folder, that page can be accessed through folder.anything.com. Most server software are configured to use the "www" subdomain if no subdomain is specified by you. Hope this helped.
Want jaadu?!
"Reality is a mere illusion, although a very persistent one" - Albert Einstein http://liquidmetal.in |
teknickle New user 4 Posts |
Please do not mind me as I clean up some misinformation here.
Actually Kevin was for the most spot on, but there is some confusion in how this all works. The WWW is actually the hostname. It was intended to be a computer called www (for worldwideweb). You would have a seperate computer for sendmail (eg smtp.mydomain.com) and one for say storing games (eg ftp.mydomain.com). It is possible for all of these name to actually resolve to a single server or to have it distributed to THOUSANDS of servers (like Google does). Later on, the concept of 'subdomains' came into the scene where you could just bury someone with a complicated all.our.hostname.r.used.up.co.uk So how to make it work? The first part of this is for DNS to be properly setup. You either have to have an A record for http://www.whatever.com to point somewhere or setup a Cname for it (canonical name) for it to point to an existing A record. So you can setup the domain to point to 69.95.169.7 and then the www to somewhere else. Or even have a www2 point to a backup mirror server. Now, this has NOTHING to do with protocol. So at this point, SSL, HTTP, SSH...any kind of traffic is to lookup this single address as to where www goes to.(let's not get into the new DNS service records). It asks where the server is at, without telling what it wants to do with it. Once you have that part configured in DNS, the traffic gets routed to the intended server. (or your firewall for inbound traffic can inspect traffic type and shape that traffic to a particular server in your DMZ). That server, then, has to tell it explicitly where those files are at. No, this is not some assumption by that server. There isn't a magic folder to drop stuff into. It has to be defined by the server. In a Windows server, you just use the IIS admin MMC snapin to configure the hostname and folders where it goes. This is much more flexible and powerful on servers that run Apache (like OSX, *BSD and Linux). Sure, it is a text configuration file of 1,500+ lines, but you get granular control of virtual hosts, ssl certs, folder restrictions and more. So, as a user, you might be able to drop files into your folder called 'www' and they 'just show up'. I have done that for a couple of my clients this past year. It was easier to throw a symbolic link to their home directory and let them see www. But the point is that there is no hard-fast rule for resolution. There are other variables out there, like when I wrote a failover script to shift web traffic seemlessly to a server mirror across the state. It is only configured for the www hostname. So why did you just get a search page? Because your web browser preferences might be set to just shoot to the closest 'match' if the FQDN cannot be resolved. The other possibility is that the DNS servers you are using for lookups (like the OpenDNS servers) are doing that for you. Long story short, someone didn't do their job. That record should have pointed to SOMETHING, if not just a 403 redirect to their primary website. But that's just my opinion. |
Utkarsh Sinha Regular user Goa, India 137 Posts |
Thank you teknickle.
But I was wondering, do I know you?
Want jaadu?!
"Reality is a mere illusion, although a very persistent one" - Albert Einstein http://liquidmetal.in |
teknickle New user 4 Posts |
Possible. Or more likely no more than 3 degrees of separation.
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