Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

You use www for the same reason that the ftp server is ftp.X and the mail server is mail.X. This allows organisations to have logical service locations separate from their current configured location.

So, www is your web service.

If you'd like a proposal, add a new type of DNS record, like the MX record, specifically for HTTP.

View on HN

Isn't this what the SRV[1] record type is designed to solve generically?

Getting adoption at the client end is likely the limiting factor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record

Yes it is. For some reason supporting SRV for HTTP is too hard https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328

For gods sake. Open since 1999!?

This bug/request has been sitting since last century.

It looks like one of those bugs requesting a new feature that sits there for years until Chrome implements the same feature (in a Google-specific partial way). Only then Mozilla rushes to implement it, but at that point it is too late and Google takes all the merit for leading the web forward.

No, that is what the TCP port number is for.

Well, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a scenario where someone needs to SSH into the company WWW server on port 22, which is of course a different machine than the FTP server that they also sometimes need to SSH into on port 22, etc... Naming groups of machines under a subdomain that describes the function they perform is an easy way to reconcile the fact that we sometimes have multiple instances of the same service running on different machines in our network (and need to access them individually).

It makes life easier if I know I can access my web servers at www.whatever.com and my FTP servers at ftp.whatever.com, rather than trying to remember that morpheus.whatever.com runs web services because it has port 80 open, or needing to worry about the FTP server also running an HTTP server on port 80 for its stats dashboard, etc.

> No, that is what the TCP port number is for.

Yes, if all you have is one IP.

Now back in the real world, we aren't trying to create new problems to solve where we already have solutions.

I thought the port would take care of this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com