On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:47, Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:
Out of curiosity: Why? I hate that every site has to have "www" in front of it, it's silly. Why don't we just have a redirect from www.archlinux.org to archlinux.org?
Those statements might be obvious to you, but I hope some might learn something, and I'll be able to refer to it in the future :) --- Because www designates the *word wide* web, i.e. website available from everywhere and for everyone. It can be seen as a part of the whole company "network" designated by the domain name. Their internal tools (webmail, specific webapps, etc. but also Jabber/SQL/etc. servers), which are only available from inside their building network, or only usable by their members/other tools, are other subparts available through their own sub.domain This tradition predates the availability of the SRV records (for the same domain name, how a specific service can be joined; still generaly unimplemented), so the distinction: 1 - of different servers for different protocols 2 - of different services based on the same protocol (http being the best example) requires different subdomain... It seems nice to use the (short) domain name for the prevalent service, so it points to the website too. Using a redirection permits to keep unique URIs for each resource and gives better positions in search engines. E-mail is an exception thanks to the MX records. Traditions last! Finally the message I wrote for you: public resource <-> URI with www... -- Geoffroy Carrier