No Stupid Questions

You’re free to be wrong.

It is superfluous information as a browser address. For a browser address there is a default intention of accessing web pages.

Exactly. "Go to my house dot Com" would probably trip some people up because they weren't expecting to be given a website name by audio, instead initially thinking they should go to my house, then being unsure if they missed prior info. Now, it's the default. For a similar cue reason, I still say things like "Vin number" if I'm trying to be clear as possible, particularly by phone. "can you give me the Vin" is sometimes misunderstood or misheard because "Vin" is a very mumbly word. "Vin number" gives an obvious retroactive explanation.

Humans use context in audio constantly and have to work backwards often to find the full meaning. It's just natural and smoothpy accomplished. If you've ever said "what" and then answered the question when it was being asked the second time, you worked backwards and figured it out

dotslashdotdashdotslashdotdash dotcom
dot com

Though, until load balancers/reverse proxies came onto the scene, separating web traffic to a separate host may have been wise. But then again, that was also when it was more textual and dialup was common.

It was not. Sysops would choose to have port 80 land on www. but every server daemon like Apache would honor the hostname set by the maintainer, regardless of what subdomain was being called. Never was there a routing method that just looked at the subdomain to determine what to do with the request. Maintainers could choose to require a particular subdomain and prebuilt server packages/management systems offered it as a convenience but it was never mandatory.

The domain routing at the registrar would be where you would translate the name into an IP and your server would determine what to do with the request based on the port and request type. At no time during this process was www. subdomain necessary to point it to your web server daemon.

You seem to be mixing the fact that many server providers wouldn't offer you a chance to change it but that doesn't mean it was necessary to route a web request. It was just a shitty offering by the provider.

No — that prefix tells the OS which application to direct the address to.

The www., ftp., mail., etc. are on the server side, so the client gets directed to the correct computer owned by the domain owner.

To some degree, this quickly became irrelevant when virtual hosting became a thing; you could have something watching on the server side that would see an attempt to connect to port 80 or port 443, check the domain the client is looking for, and redirect them to the right internal or external IP address.

With the onset of CDNs, it became even less meaningful since load and availability balancers will now decide what computer will eventually receive the request.

All you really need is the URI (https://) and the port (:443) and everything else can be a black box.

Why don’t we see :80 and :443 on URLs anymore? Because a web browser, when it handles the URI request, auto-maps to the default ports for that URI unless it is explicitly told to use another.

As a result, you can enter example.com into a browser address bar, and you’ll automatically be taken to [https://guest@www.example.com/ :443/] but all you’ll see on the browser bar is example.com.

[edit] hah; even Lemmy is munging my URLs to remove the bits it deems unnecessary.

Okay. ftp://, http://, https:// are associate with protocols that operate on a common port. You can execute “cat /etc/protocol” (on macOS or Linux terminal) and see each associate common port and their protocol name.

The protocol is associated with a port that is open on a host, which is associated with a process in the OS and that process listens and “talks” those ways when a host connects with a client, like a web browser.

Those are schemes and they are not new, there are many others as well. Some you may see in a browser are http, mailto, file. Others that you won't typically see in browsers include ldap(s), imap, jdbc, odbc, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_URI_schemes

Newer, yes. Not very new.

The URL format of protocol://hostname.domain:port/path was defined in 1994. Prior to that you would use use an ftp client, usually on the command line like:

ftp hostname.domain

If you just entered "reddit.com" into the address bar, it will automatically assume the www. in front. If there's another valid address such as "old.reddit.com," you need to enter the prefix in place of www or it will just go to www.reddit.com. 🤦‍♂️

Websites that don't use the www subdomain and are valid without it won't have it get automatically added, but if it's not valid it will attempt to use the www subdomain and either give a 404 because it doesn't exist or will send you to a different site than you expect.

There was a time when you couldn't even have "reddit.com" work at all without actually typing the www. part. Just like when websites aren't secure and the automatic HTTPS needs to have the S removed so the page can load.

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO...