and why is 'www' even part of the address when we get to the exact same site without writing it, like you can type in 'yahoo.com' and get to it out without writing www?
2007-03-25 08:47:38 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Internet
http stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, it's just telling the web server to use that protocol to send you the web pages. Your browser is set up to read from information in a certain format specified by the protocol. It is assumed that when you don't specify it, it's going to use http automatically behind the scenes without you seeing it.
www just stands for world wide web. it doesn't stand for much and usually the page with www or without www will give you the same webpage because the DNS (Domain Name Server) points both addresses to the same page. In theory, it is entirely possible to have www.yahoo.com and yahoo.com to point to different pages if we wanted to, but yahoo bought both addresses and set it up to point to the same page.
If you want to make an analogy to street addresses, it's like have "main street" and "main st.", the two names are slightly different, but they point to the same street. Now if someone wanted to put them as separate streets, they could, in theory, but it would be confusing to everyone. Same applies to web addresses.
2007-03-25 09:02:30 · answer #1 · answered by rice kid 4 · 2⤊ 0⤋
All sites have http:// at the beginning. Its implied so sometimes it won't be written. http describes the protocol used - hyper-text transfer protocol. Sometimes you will also see https:// which is a secure site where your data to and from the site is encrypted.
A website name is a hostname or a name for the computer on which the site resides. .com .net .org is what's known as the top level domain. The yahoo in yahoo.com is the "domain name." This would be owned by some organization or entity and could have many servers underneath it. The www in www.yahoo.com is the hostname. It refers to a specific computer in the yahoo.com domain. It's simply customary to name your webserver www but you don't have to name it that you can name it anything. For example gmail.google.com is also a valid website.
Entering any computer name is running a web server will bring up a web page. Also most companies will forward simply yahoo.com to the appropriate webserver for their domain so you don't really have to type in the www.
2007-03-25 15:58:15 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
The URL of any website actually does begin with "http://". If you type in a URL into the address bar without it, the browser adds it for you (try it!). Leaving it off is just a "shortcut" that is built into the web browser, but it's always there behind the scenes.
Some websites have aliases as well. So for example, http://www.yahoo.com and http://yahoo.com both take you to the same website. One is just an alias for another (these are called DNS aliases). Not all websites have these aliases without the "www" part, so sometimes you *do* have to type in the "www" prefix.
2007-03-25 15:59:53 · answer #3 · answered by leadingtoneseventh 2 · 2⤊ 0⤋
i'm pretty sure these ppl already answered your question, but i think we don't need to type in WWW b/c the internet already knows that anything typed in the address bar immediately sees it as a web page. but not all sites work this way, www is needed but i think its only for those addresses that aren't common like yahoo.
by the way, http:// can also be httpS:// --> the S means secure, its in those shopping sites like walmart or amazon and also has a padlock picture in the lower-right corner. Just don't type in sensitive info on sites without being sucure.
God bless
2007-03-25 16:29:32 · answer #4 · answered by musikartguy05 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
i think that in original all sites have http:// in front of them. however, most internet servers, browsers, and companies make everything easier for us because we're lazy. better said yet we don't have to type in www because t's not required to. if you have google toolbar, you can even just type in the site's name without www or .com and it will still pop-up! you see what I mean?
2007-03-25 15:56:39 · answer #5 · answered by Nik person 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋