[arch-dev-public] mailman hiccup

[Geoffroy Carrier]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:47, Thomas Bächler <thomas at 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