Israeli website on Linux: beer-sheva.muni.il

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012, Robert Wallner wrote about "Re: Israeli website on Linux: beer-sheva.muni.il":
> I would be happy to know why this is such a widespread DNS (mal)practice,
> not to set up an A record on the main domain, only on the 'www' subdomain.
> Am I missing something?

In the early Web days, "www" was just one of the many possible services.
If you had an FTP service, HTTP service, login service, and perhaps a bunch
of other services, it made perfect sense to have a different domains for each
service: www.domain.com pointed to the HTTP server, and ftp.domain.com
pointed to the FTP server, for example. sometimes, "domain.com"'s A
record pointed to a login server - or something else which was deemed
more important than the new WWW server.

The same problem when it comes to mail service was solved earlier on when
an "MX" record was added which is separate from the "A" record, so
"domain.com" could have a different meaning when used in mail and for,
say, ssh or ftp or http. Unfortunately, there were no separate "HTTP" and
"FTP" or "SSH" records, just the one "A" record.

Anyway, as WWW became more popular, and eclipsed (in the public's eye)
all other services, all of this started to look very redundant, and now
the accepted practice is to drop this "www" and put an A record on the
domain itself. Moreover, people also started dropping the "http://"
protocol part, as that became the default as well. I said it's an
accepted practice, but it's not yet a universal practice.

I still remember in the early days of the Web where people broke their
teeth saying out loud URLs like "http://www.google.com/" - "heich tee
tee pee colon slash slash double-you double-you double-you dot google
dot com", whereas now people just say "google dot com", or even just
"google" (assuming the listener will just go to a search engine and
enter that as a search word).


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                 Wednesday, Jan 25 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Communism is the equal distribution of
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |poverty.