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Comment by lucisferre | Hacker News Reader

Does that site actually make a case or do they just not like the "www" being there?

Yes.

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the 'http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

And if any web browser supported SRV records to do this properly, we wouldn't have an issue. You don't have to use mail.domain.com because MX records were created to solve this exact issue for mail servers. SRV records were a general purpose solution to the same problem.

that's great, mail servers have an MX record, rather than relying on an A record for the base domain to provide only one service, which can cause confusion with other services.

> Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain?

You mean host. www is a host in example.com. Protocol indicator (http/https) and host name (www, mail, bob) have nothing to do with each other.

You don't have to do @host.example.com if there is a special DNS record for SMTP to indicate where to actually send mail, without it you do have to do host.example.com.

> automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80

What HTTP server? if the URL is www.example.com we connect to the server named www, it could be named bob if we wanted. Without the host name given you have to create a catchall to tell clients to send ALL traffic without a hostname to.

The comparison between protocols is really stupid.

That's absolutely not how it works. Firstly, "www" is a subdomain of "example.com". The subdomain could match the hostname of the server that hosts it, but that's rarely the case (there can be multiple servers behind a load-balancer, for example). Secondly, you don't have to create a wildcard record for "example.com" to work. You just have to add an A record for it (just like you would do for any subdomain thereof).

It sounds like both sites are fine with websites that redirect to www.

"However, any site that takes in traffic one way or the other on both the www host and the bare domain are acceptable here."

Their argument seems only to be that with the https?:// protocol prefix in the URI, the 'www' is redundant. No other arguments than 'time consuming' is presented.

Even their FAQ doesn't answer why they dislike 'www' other than being seemingly redundant. I personally prefer without www on my websites, and my cache server is set up to ignore cookies on static content.

Yes but your clients probably are still sending them to you.

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