18 ms·

Considering a subdomain "trivial" is ridiculous... there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com". Not only can they serve different sites, th

Considering a subdomain "trivial" is ridiculous... there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com". Not only can they serve different sites, they can even have different DNS records! It seems that "m." is also considered a trivial subdomain. So when a user clicks a link to a "m.facebook.com" uri, they'll be confused why FB looks different when the browser reports it's on "facebook.com". I sincerely hope Firefox doesn't follow suit.

pishpash 8y ago
Google knows best, DNS standards be damned. Practice makes standard. /s
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  What part of the DNS standard governs how URLs are displayed, exactly?
trocadero 8y ago
>there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com" Can you link to a site where these two are different?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- geophertz 8y ago
  www.pool.ntp.org pool.ntp.org
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  From one of the comments there: http://www.pool.ntp.org http://www.pool.ntp.org vs http://pool.ntp.org http://pool.ntp.org One takes you to the website about the project, the other goes to a random ntp server.
  - trocadero 8y ago
    Those go to the same place for me
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dsl 8y ago
      Some small subset of pool servers run an HTTP server that redirects you to www. Not all of them. You just got lucky.
      - euyyn 8y ago
        I must be lucky too, as I got the same result from both.
      - Volundr 8y ago
        That's exactly right. www.pool.ntp.org is the project site. pool.ntp.org is for getting an NTP server. Which one you get will depend on your location and random chance. That server will run NTP, but what it happens to run on port 80, if anything, is up to the operator of the server.
    - drb91 8y ago
      They definitely do not for me (ios).
    - da_chicken 8y ago
      Not me. http://www.pool.ntp.org/ http://www.pool.ntp.org/ redirects me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ https://www.ntppool.org/en/. http://pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ takes me to an "It works!" default Apache 2 page for an Ubuntu installation. As the comment in the issue describes, http://pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ takes you to a random ntp server. If you want another example, try google.com using Google's own DNS: PS U:\> nslookup - 8.8.8.8 Default Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 > google.com Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: Name: google.com Addresses: 2607:f8b0:4009:810::200e 172.217.8.206 > www.google.com Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: Name: forcesafesearch.google.com Addresses: 216.239.38.120 216.239.38.120 Aliases: www.google.com Even if you ultimately end up at the same site through redirects, you're clearly not going to the same site initially.
- runjake 8y ago
  Many orgs do this. For example, with Active Directory, the DNS A record for your foo.com domain must resolve to your domain controllers. Your www.foo.com will resolve to a separate non-domain controller web server. I think a lot of the commenters here are thinking solely in terms of commercial web services such as twitter.com and such, but there's so much more to the wider landscape.
  - EvanAnderson 8y ago
    Thinking about it that way gives me conflicted feelings. Much as I hate what Google has done here I also feel like any organization stupid enough to use their public domain name for their Active Directory domain name deserves every little pain they receive for it.
    - tatersolid 8y ago
      You lack the compassion that comes with experience. My $dayjob has our AD root domain the same as our public root domain. Because we implemented AD in the year 2000, and this was Microsoft’s recommendation for domain naming way back then. And if you use Exchange, you can’t rename your AD domain, you have to rebuild your forest and migrate piecemeal. So we’re stuck with it. The practice of using Corp.example.com did not evolve until many years after Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 were in the wild. So we run http redirectors on each of our domain controllers to send traffic to www.
      - EvanAnderson 8y ago
        This one is kind of a "religious" topic for me, I guess. I'm sorry that it is, but it makes me exceedingly defensive. I trained on Active Directory (AD) with a group of veteran sysadmins in 1999. I don't have access to the "Microsoft Official Curriculum" book from my class in '99 (long-since thrown away), but I have a distinct memory of a lively conversation in class re: the pitfalls of using a public domain name as an AD domain name (or, worse yet, a Forest Root domain name) during the class. It was very evident to our group of veteran sysadmins that using a public domain name in AD would create silly make-work scenarios (like installing IIS on every DC just to run redirect visitors to "www.example.com"-- just as you describe, albeit IIS didn't natively support sending redirects at the time). I'd go further and suggest that anybody with a modicum of familiarity with DNS knows having multiple roots-of-authority for a single domain name is a bad idea. Microsoft not supporting split-horizon in their DNS server (like BIND does with 'views') compounded the difficulties with such a scenario in an all-Windows environment. I certainly wouldn't argue that Microsoft has given exclusively good recommendations for AD domain names in the past (evidence ".local" in Windows Small Business Server), but I am reasonably certain that their documentation always suggested that using a subdomain of a public domain name was a supported and workable option. I started deploying AD in 2000. I've deployed roughly 50 forests in different enterprises, and I've never used a public domain name as an AD domain name. I've domain-renamed all my subsequently-acquired Customers for whom it was an option (which it was, so long as they had not yet installed Exchange 2007), and have been rebuilding the Forests of Customers who made the wrong decision in the past, where it makes economical sense.
- acdanger 8y ago
  Many companies have their marketing site at www. and they're app at at, say, app. e.g. https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/ vs https://app.netlify.com/ https://app.netlify.com/
  - jhki 8y ago
    app. subdomains are not hidden
  - mplewis 8y ago
    That's www vs app, not www vs lack-of.
    - acdanger 8y ago
      Ah. Thanks for clarifying that.
- kageneko 8y ago
  I don't remember the site offhand, but I was going to one recently where example.com didn't even work, it was some weird error page -- you had to use www.example.com. If it comes to me, I'll post it.
  - richrichardsson 8y ago
    I've seen this behaviour, and the reverse. Can't remember examples, but it does happen.
  - baby 8y ago
    This is what Chrome's update is trying to fix. Developers are confuser when setting up dns if they should have www or not have www or only have www...
    - martimarkov 8y ago
      Not really fixing it thou because they just strip the www part from the name. If the developer does not setup www.domain.com and the user goes there chrome will not “fix” anything. I haven’t tested it but it will most likely show up as domain.com in the address bar and will result in an error show to the customer. If chrome wants to strip www as it’s essentially the same domain.com they can submit an RFC and not just decide for everyone. Honestly I hope they start making more stupid decisions like this so ppl move to Firefox so we have more competition.
      - baby 8y ago
        > If the developer does not setup www.domain.com and the user goes there chrome will not “fix” anything Yup, that's on the developers. Hopefully this fix will make it so that it will be easier to setup DNS with just one domain instead of 2. Props to Chrome.
- shodan666 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
- psychometry 8y ago
  Consider the different types of records you need to add for those examples if your web host is Heroku or some other cloud provider: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains
- aylmao 8y ago
  Someone mentioned www.citibank.com.sg vs citibank.com.sg in the issue. One of my school's websites: I can't remember what it was and this was before I understood what the difference is, but www worked much better than without iirc. This also applies to m.*, so literally any web-app with a mobile version.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  See the issue. http://www.pool.ntp.org/ http://www.pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ https://www.citibank.com.sg/ https://www.citibank.com.sg/ https://citibank.com.sg/ https://citibank.com.sg/ Plus, this actually removes any www part of the domain. So subdomain.www.example.com shows as subdomain.example.com Why even open that can of worms?
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  Read the source link. A concrete example (Citibank) is given.
- masswerk 8y ago
  A) Consider any sharing platforms where unrelated bodies coexist with distinct subdomains under a common root domain (e.g., Blogspot, Tumbler, etc) While "www" is probably a reserved name and mostly not of practical concern, "m" may be a practical issue. B) Consider subdomains for test-purpose like "www.test.www.example.com" (now displayed as "test.example.com", which is actually not even the root of the specific subdomain). C) Users unsure, if they are on the full-featured or a reduced mobile site, when "m" is hidden. D) I may actually want to have a service agnostic default host at the root and subdomains for dedicated servers (like "www", "ftp", "mail", "stun", "voip", etc). Maybe this one just returns a short text message by design, if accessed on port 80. Not every domain is just about the WWW. (Edit: While we may assume that such a server would forward in practice, this may be assuming too much.)
- janeroe 8y ago
  >> there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com" > Can you link to a site where these two are different? There are 3rd level domains where everyone can register "www.{TLD}". E.g., .com.kg, .net.kg, .org.kg. Look at the www.com.kg. It's also available as www.www.com.kg. Or www.org.kg that's in fact www.www.org.kg. If you display just the last part (com.kg, org.kg), does that mean that you're viewing the root website? Nope, that doesn't. That means that chrome is fucked up.
- alanh 8y ago
  for ages, my former high school's website did not respond to requests that omitted the www. subdomain :/
kevin_b_er 8y ago
m. is where you often receive a feature degraded, app-walled, or sign-in walled website that isn't present on the full-featured website. I want to know that I'm receiving a degraded version of a website and that maybe dropping the m. will restore it.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  It's also where you receive a lightweight, fast, to the point version. Admittedly, it's not just "m", but If I _must_ use Facebook the only bearable version is mbasic.facebook.com
  - leadingthenet 8y ago
    It’s certainly not true in the case of Reddit. Their mobile site is horrible by any measure, way slower than the old desktop site.
    - mrkstu 8y ago
      But they want you to use the app anyway, so they don't put effort into the web version.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  m. is where you find a lightweight, no-bullshit version of a site that doesn't load excessive images or Flash or JS before required. I want to know I'm on a faster version of a website. (Seriously, mbasic.facebook.com allows chat, whereas m.facebook.com reminds you to install the Facebook app.) You're the second person recently to lament mobile sites on HN. I think they're great. Responsive isn't there yet.
  - oliveshell 8y ago
    Some of them are great. Some of them do incomprehensible shit like loading text in chunks while scrolling, making it impossible to scroll to the end of an article without waiting 5-10 seconds for it to appear. (This might be a result of my using a content blocker to block mobile ads, but the fact that it’s even possible infuriates me as a user. I mean, it’s text! Just show me the text!) I agree with you 100% that responsive design isn’t there yet.
stvkoch 8y ago
humm... for sure that wasn't a technical decision, and here start the problem.
masswerk 8y ago
This is certainly subverting the domain name system. I can't see the value or gain in security by this. (If you want to put focus on the domain, then display the host-part with less contrast, i.e. grey, but don't hide any potentially vital information. Otherwise, put out a RFC, defining "www" as a substitute for "*", or a zero-value atom, in order to guarantee consistent behavior.) Edit: There are also legal concerns with catch-all domains in some countries. Blending the lines certainly doesn't help.
- masswerk 8y ago
  A proposal for better security with domain names: The domain name system has been around for decades and it's a clever and proven system. It can – and should be – taught in school and, arguably, knowledge of it is, while not difficult to obtain, essential in our times. Additional ambiguity in this is probably not what we want. Arguably, the most sincere problems arise from mixed alphabets with Unicode domains and look-alike characters/glyphs. This could be addressed by a) going back to codepages (Unicode subranges) and defining a valid subset for each range, and b) enforcing a domain name (hostname and domain) to be in a single codepage. Clients should derive the codepage by the Unicode range and generate a codepage-identifier, which may be displayed as a badge, identifying the respective range. And, of course, any mixed domains should be regarded illegal and invalid. (We may even want to make this codepage-identifier a mandatory particle of any URI, preceding the hostname.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    >enforcing a domain name (hostname and domain) to be in a single codepage this is essentially what is already implemented in most browsers. You can't mix characters from different scripts in a domain name, except for special cases (e.g. japanese and latin are frequently used together and have little potential for confusion)
    - masswerk 8y ago
UncleMeat 8y ago
> It seems that "m." is also considered a trivial subdomain. So when a user clicks a link to a "m.facebook.com" uri, they'll be confused why FB looks different when the browser reports it's on "facebook.com". Will they? I find it very unlikely that many users would even check the URL in the first place, let alone understand that m.foo and foo route to different places.
sofaofthedamned 8y ago
Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the "http://" http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you type it in the browser. Most decent websites revert "www." or without to whichever is the canonical version; the one without should be that tbf. The 'm.' is ridiculous too and ruins shareability. If the link was the bare domain, and the frontend does any switch that's needed, we'd all be better off.
- wst_ 8y ago
  How about older people? Can your parents explain the difference? Mine can't and I can assure you most of them are the same.
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    Good point - but even my mum (65 and not very good with phones or computers) will just bash the bare domain into her browser.If it's got "www." she'll use that, if not she won't. She still knows it's a web thing, the www. for her and everybody else is superfluous. Things change. We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. The people who can't deal with this are vanishingly small, and those that can't are likely not your target market; or they're the sort that'll just consider Facebook to be the web. I'm not disagreeing with your point btw that some people can't deal with this - all I disagree is the extent.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. 24 from the RFC, 26 from the discussion that led to it, per Wikipedia.
      - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
        Good point. I was on Janet / ARPANet before the web. Point conceded!
emmelaich 8y ago
Most people don't care about the location bar. Everytime they want to use Facebook, they type 'facebook' or maybe 'facebook login' in the location/search bar. And to get to their gmail account they might type their own email address in the location bar.
- sbarre 8y ago
  Ehh this might have been true 10+ years ago, but most people are more savvy than that today.. I think you are describing something that is less and less common (which may explain why Google is trying to encourage people to keep doing it).
  - pwg 8y ago
    You'd be really surprised. There are still people that do exactly what the grandparent comment relates, today, in 2018.
    - Godel_unicode 8y ago
      "Less common" isn't "doesn't exist".
      - pwg 8y ago
        Yes, but I suspect it is far more common (I have no evidence to supply however) than the grandparent comment appears to imply. We (the HN crowd) can easily get caught in a 'bubble' where because we known the details, and those with whom we typically associate also know the details, that we extrapolate those observations to conclude that "most people" know the details. But until one's been in a situation of providing support or training for a diverse user group, one does not see just how little technical knowledge the "average joe" (a set of which we the HN crowd are very much not a member of) has of these things. The "average joe"'s level of technical knowledge is astonishingly low compared to the HN crowd's level of the same.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    Yahoo Search still shows a second search box under the first search result if you search for Google, to capture users that search for Google then type in their actual search term, even when they're already on a search engine. They may not make up a huge proportion of users, but they still make up a huge number of people in actual terms.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I think this is exactly right. All the letters of the name are important and cannot be left off. If people want to equate www.domain to domain they can put a 301 redirect on the www address but the browser has no business making assumptions about what the owner of the name space thinks are equivalent.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  Once upon a time, back in the middle 1990s when it was a major WWW browser, Netscape Navigator assumed that it could wrap domain names in URLs within "www." and ".com".
  - parliament32 8y ago
    Interestingly, in Firefox, you can type a word into the URL bar and hit ctrl+enter to add "www" and "com". Shift+enter adds "www" and "net".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
briandear 8y ago
This is going to break a lot of sites.
a1o 8y ago
Can't trivial subdomains just be colored gray and done instead of getting away with them? Also maybe color blue the .com and similar.

pishpash 8y ago

Google knows best, DNS standards be damned. Practice makes standard. /s

Godel_unicode 8y ago
What part of the DNS standard governs how URLs are displayed, exactly?

trocadero 8y ago

>there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com" Can you link to a site where these two are different?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
geophertz 8y ago
www.pool.ntp.org pool.ntp.org
ddebernardy 8y ago
From one of the comments there: http://www.pool.ntp.org http://www.pool.ntp.org vs http://pool.ntp.org http://pool.ntp.org One takes you to the website about the project, the other goes to a random ntp server.
- trocadero 8y ago
  Those go to the same place for me
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsl 8y ago
    Some small subset of pool servers run an HTTP server that redirects you to www. Not all of them. You just got lucky.
    - euyyn 8y ago
      I must be lucky too, as I got the same result from both.
    - Volundr 8y ago
      That's exactly right. www.pool.ntp.org is the project site. pool.ntp.org is for getting an NTP server. Which one you get will depend on your location and random chance. That server will run NTP, but what it happens to run on port 80, if anything, is up to the operator of the server.
  - drb91 8y ago
    They definitely do not for me (ios).
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    Not me. http://www.pool.ntp.org/ http://www.pool.ntp.org/ redirects me to https://www.ntppool.org/en/ https://www.ntppool.org/en/. http://pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ takes me to an "It works!" default Apache 2 page for an Ubuntu installation. As the comment in the issue describes, http://pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ takes you to a random ntp server. If you want another example, try google.com using Google's own DNS: PS U:\> nslookup - 8.8.8.8 Default Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 > google.com Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: Name: google.com Addresses: 2607:f8b0:4009:810::200e 172.217.8.206 > www.google.com Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com Address: 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: Name: forcesafesearch.google.com Addresses: 216.239.38.120 216.239.38.120 Aliases: www.google.com Even if you ultimately end up at the same site through redirects, you're clearly not going to the same site initially.
runjake 8y ago
Many orgs do this. For example, with Active Directory, the DNS A record for your foo.com domain must resolve to your domain controllers. Your www.foo.com will resolve to a separate non-domain controller web server. I think a lot of the commenters here are thinking solely in terms of commercial web services such as twitter.com and such, but there's so much more to the wider landscape.
- EvanAnderson 8y ago
  Thinking about it that way gives me conflicted feelings. Much as I hate what Google has done here I also feel like any organization stupid enough to use their public domain name for their Active Directory domain name deserves every little pain they receive for it.
  - tatersolid 8y ago
    You lack the compassion that comes with experience. My $dayjob has our AD root domain the same as our public root domain. Because we implemented AD in the year 2000, and this was Microsoft’s recommendation for domain naming way back then. And if you use Exchange, you can’t rename your AD domain, you have to rebuild your forest and migrate piecemeal. So we’re stuck with it. The practice of using Corp.example.com did not evolve until many years after Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 were in the wild. So we run http redirectors on each of our domain controllers to send traffic to www.
    - EvanAnderson 8y ago
      This one is kind of a "religious" topic for me, I guess. I'm sorry that it is, but it makes me exceedingly defensive. I trained on Active Directory (AD) with a group of veteran sysadmins in 1999. I don't have access to the "Microsoft Official Curriculum" book from my class in '99 (long-since thrown away), but I have a distinct memory of a lively conversation in class re: the pitfalls of using a public domain name as an AD domain name (or, worse yet, a Forest Root domain name) during the class. It was very evident to our group of veteran sysadmins that using a public domain name in AD would create silly make-work scenarios (like installing IIS on every DC just to run redirect visitors to "www.example.com"-- just as you describe, albeit IIS didn't natively support sending redirects at the time). I'd go further and suggest that anybody with a modicum of familiarity with DNS knows having multiple roots-of-authority for a single domain name is a bad idea. Microsoft not supporting split-horizon in their DNS server (like BIND does with 'views') compounded the difficulties with such a scenario in an all-Windows environment. I certainly wouldn't argue that Microsoft has given exclusively good recommendations for AD domain names in the past (evidence ".local" in Windows Small Business Server), but I am reasonably certain that their documentation always suggested that using a subdomain of a public domain name was a supported and workable option. I started deploying AD in 2000. I've deployed roughly 50 forests in different enterprises, and I've never used a public domain name as an AD domain name. I've domain-renamed all my subsequently-acquired Customers for whom it was an option (which it was, so long as they had not yet installed Exchange 2007), and have been rebuilding the Forests of Customers who made the wrong decision in the past, where it makes economical sense.
acdanger 8y ago
Many companies have their marketing site at www. and they're app at at, say, app. e.g. https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/ vs https://app.netlify.com/ https://app.netlify.com/
- jhki 8y ago
  app. subdomains are not hidden
- mplewis 8y ago
  That's www vs app, not www vs lack-of.
  - acdanger 8y ago
    Ah. Thanks for clarifying that.
kageneko 8y ago
I don't remember the site offhand, but I was going to one recently where example.com didn't even work, it was some weird error page -- you had to use www.example.com. If it comes to me, I'll post it.
- richrichardsson 8y ago
  I've seen this behaviour, and the reverse. Can't remember examples, but it does happen.
- baby 8y ago
  This is what Chrome's update is trying to fix. Developers are confuser when setting up dns if they should have www or not have www or only have www...
  - martimarkov 8y ago
    Not really fixing it thou because they just strip the www part from the name. If the developer does not setup www.domain.com and the user goes there chrome will not “fix” anything. I haven’t tested it but it will most likely show up as domain.com in the address bar and will result in an error show to the customer. If chrome wants to strip www as it’s essentially the same domain.com they can submit an RFC and not just decide for everyone. Honestly I hope they start making more stupid decisions like this so ppl move to Firefox so we have more competition.
    - baby 8y ago
      > If the developer does not setup www.domain.com and the user goes there chrome will not “fix” anything Yup, that's on the developers. Hopefully this fix will make it so that it will be easier to setup DNS with just one domain instead of 2. Props to Chrome.
shodan666 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
psychometry 8y ago
Consider the different types of records you need to add for those examples if your web host is Heroku or some other cloud provider: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains
aylmao 8y ago
Someone mentioned www.citibank.com.sg vs citibank.com.sg in the issue. One of my school's websites: I can't remember what it was and this was before I understood what the difference is, but www worked much better than without iirc. This also applies to m.*, so literally any web-app with a mobile version.
paulddraper 8y ago
See the issue. http://www.pool.ntp.org/ http://www.pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ http://pool.ntp.org/ https://www.citibank.com.sg/ https://www.citibank.com.sg/ https://citibank.com.sg/ https://citibank.com.sg/ Plus, this actually removes any www part of the domain. So subdomain.www.example.com shows as subdomain.example.com Why even open that can of worms?
jsjohnst 8y ago
Read the source link. A concrete example (Citibank) is given.
masswerk 8y ago
A) Consider any sharing platforms where unrelated bodies coexist with distinct subdomains under a common root domain (e.g., Blogspot, Tumbler, etc) While "www" is probably a reserved name and mostly not of practical concern, "m" may be a practical issue. B) Consider subdomains for test-purpose like "www.test.www.example.com" (now displayed as "test.example.com", which is actually not even the root of the specific subdomain). C) Users unsure, if they are on the full-featured or a reduced mobile site, when "m" is hidden. D) I may actually want to have a service agnostic default host at the root and subdomains for dedicated servers (like "www", "ftp", "mail", "stun", "voip", etc). Maybe this one just returns a short text message by design, if accessed on port 80. Not every domain is just about the WWW. (Edit: While we may assume that such a server would forward in practice, this may be assuming too much.)
janeroe 8y ago
>> there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com" > Can you link to a site where these two are different? There are 3rd level domains where everyone can register "www.{TLD}". E.g., .com.kg, .net.kg, .org.kg. Look at the www.com.kg. It's also available as www.www.com.kg. Or www.org.kg that's in fact www.www.org.kg. If you display just the last part (com.kg, org.kg), does that mean that you're viewing the root website? Nope, that doesn't. That means that chrome is fucked up.
alanh 8y ago
for ages, my former high school's website did not respond to requests that omitted the www. subdomain :/

kevin_b_er 8y ago

m. is where you often receive a feature degraded, app-walled, or sign-in walled website that isn't present on the full-featured website. I want to know that I'm receiving a degraded version of a website and that maybe dropping the m. will restore it.

CalRobert 8y ago
It's also where you receive a lightweight, fast, to the point version. Admittedly, it's not just "m", but If I _must_ use Facebook the only bearable version is mbasic.facebook.com
- leadingthenet 8y ago
  It’s certainly not true in the case of Reddit. Their mobile site is horrible by any measure, way slower than the old desktop site.
  - mrkstu 8y ago
    But they want you to use the app anyway, so they don't put effort into the web version.
unethical_ban 8y ago
m. is where you find a lightweight, no-bullshit version of a site that doesn't load excessive images or Flash or JS before required. I want to know I'm on a faster version of a website. (Seriously, mbasic.facebook.com allows chat, whereas m.facebook.com reminds you to install the Facebook app.) You're the second person recently to lament mobile sites on HN. I think they're great. Responsive isn't there yet.
- oliveshell 8y ago
  Some of them are great. Some of them do incomprehensible shit like loading text in chunks while scrolling, making it impossible to scroll to the end of an article without waiting 5-10 seconds for it to appear. (This might be a result of my using a content blocker to block mobile ads, but the fact that it’s even possible infuriates me as a user. I mean, it’s text! Just show me the text!) I agree with you 100% that responsive design isn’t there yet.

stvkoch 8y ago

humm... for sure that wasn't a technical decision, and here start the problem.

masswerk 8y ago

This is certainly subverting the domain name system. I can't see the value or gain in security by this. (If you want to put focus on the domain, then display the host-part with less contrast, i.e. grey, but don't hide any potentially vital information. Otherwise, put out a RFC, defining "www" as a substitute for "*", or a zero-value atom, in order to guarantee consistent behavior.) Edit: There are also legal concerns with catch-all domains in some countries. Blending the lines certainly doesn't help.

masswerk 8y ago
A proposal for better security with domain names: The domain name system has been around for decades and it's a clever and proven system. It can – and should be – taught in school and, arguably, knowledge of it is, while not difficult to obtain, essential in our times. Additional ambiguity in this is probably not what we want. Arguably, the most sincere problems arise from mixed alphabets with Unicode domains and look-alike characters/glyphs. This could be addressed by a) going back to codepages (Unicode subranges) and defining a valid subset for each range, and b) enforcing a domain name (hostname and domain) to be in a single codepage. Clients should derive the codepage by the Unicode range and generate a codepage-identifier, which may be displayed as a badge, identifying the respective range. And, of course, any mixed domains should be regarded illegal and invalid. (We may even want to make this codepage-identifier a mandatory particle of any URI, preceding the hostname.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wongarsu 8y ago
  >enforcing a domain name (hostname and domain) to be in a single codepage this is essentially what is already implemented in most browsers. You can't mix characters from different scripts in a domain name, except for special cases (e.g. japanese and latin are frequently used together and have little potential for confusion)
  - masswerk 8y ago

UncleMeat 8y ago

> It seems that "m." is also considered a trivial subdomain. So when a user clicks a link to a "m.facebook.com" uri, they'll be confused why FB looks different when the browser reports it's on "facebook.com". Will they? I find it very unlikely that many users would even check the URL in the first place, let alone understand that m.foo and foo route to different places.

sofaofthedamned 8y ago

Oh come on. "www." was used as a way of delineating what was a web address. Hence the fashion of putting that there so people knew you had to do it in the browser. Before then people used to also put the "http://" http://" on there, and the combination of the two on vehicles/signs was ridiculous. We're now in a web world. People know what a URL is. "domain.com" isn't ambiguous, it's obvious to man, beast or child that you type it in the browser. Most decent websites revert "www." or without to whichever is the canonical version; the one without should be that tbf. The 'm.' is ridiculous too and ruins shareability. If the link was the bare domain, and the frontend does any switch that's needed, we'd all be better off.

wst_ 8y ago
How about older people? Can your parents explain the difference? Mine can't and I can assure you most of them are the same.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  Good point - but even my mum (65 and not very good with phones or computers) will just bash the bare domain into her browser.If it's got "www." she'll use that, if not she won't. She still knows it's a web thing, the www. for her and everybody else is superfluous. Things change. We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. The people who can't deal with this are vanishingly small, and those that can't are likely not your target market; or they're the sort that'll just consider Facebook to be the web. I'm not disagreeing with your point btw that some people can't deal with this - all I disagree is the extent.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > We've had something like 30-odd years of URLs. 24 from the RFC, 26 from the discussion that led to it, per Wikipedia.
    - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
      Good point. I was on Janet / ARPANet before the web. Point conceded!

emmelaich 8y ago

Most people don't care about the location bar. Everytime they want to use Facebook, they type 'facebook' or maybe 'facebook login' in the location/search bar. And to get to their gmail account they might type their own email address in the location bar.

sbarre 8y ago
Ehh this might have been true 10+ years ago, but most people are more savvy than that today.. I think you are describing something that is less and less common (which may explain why Google is trying to encourage people to keep doing it).
- pwg 8y ago
  You'd be really surprised. There are still people that do exactly what the grandparent comment relates, today, in 2018.
  - Godel_unicode 8y ago
    "Less common" isn't "doesn't exist".
    - pwg 8y ago
      Yes, but I suspect it is far more common (I have no evidence to supply however) than the grandparent comment appears to imply. We (the HN crowd) can easily get caught in a 'bubble' where because we known the details, and those with whom we typically associate also know the details, that we extrapolate those observations to conclude that "most people" know the details. But until one's been in a situation of providing support or training for a diverse user group, one does not see just how little technical knowledge the "average joe" (a set of which we the HN crowd are very much not a member of) has of these things. The "average joe"'s level of technical knowledge is astonishingly low compared to the HN crowd's level of the same.
- vidarh 8y ago
  Yahoo Search still shows a second search box under the first search result if you search for Google, to capture users that search for Google then type in their actual search term, even when they're already on a search engine. They may not make up a huge proportion of users, but they still make up a huge number of people in actual terms.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I think this is exactly right. All the letters of the name are important and cannot be left off. If people want to equate www.domain to domain they can put a 301 redirect on the www address but the browser has no business making assumptions about what the owner of the name space thinks are equivalent.

JdeBP 8y ago
Once upon a time, back in the middle 1990s when it was a major WWW browser, Netscape Navigator assumed that it could wrap domain names in URLs within "www." and ".com".
- parliament32 8y ago
  Interestingly, in Firefox, you can type a word into the URL bar and hit ctrl+enter to add "www" and "com". Shift+enter adds "www" and "net".

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

briandear 8y ago

This is going to break a lot of sites.

a1o 8y ago

Can't trivial subdomains just be colored gray and done instead of getting away with them? Also maybe color blue the .com and similar.