19 Jul
2008
19 Jul
'08
12:03 p.m.
Diane Bruce wrote:
It's hugely funny or sad to see domain
registrar's automatically
prefixing domain names with 'www'. I have often joked to others that
we could safely remove the destination port from tcp/ip packets, after
all, it's always going to be port 80 right? We could save two bytes
per packet. (Again, I was joking! apart from DNS and e-mail not working
it would work fine right? ;-) )
I think it goes back to the original idea of using a separate server for
each service. So back in the day, ftp.apple.com was really a dedicated
ftp server. (DNS round-robin I think came later, is that the case or am
I smoking crack?)
Other machines were used for other purposes, hence ns1. ns2, mail, etc.
The ports had little to do with it.
ftp to apple.com would get you nowhere. ftp.anycompany.com would likely
work. Even if the machine might be named gandalf, or sneetch, or
mickey, or potassium.
So they just extended that idea and slapped on www.