4 ms·
> while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people Sometimes. Far from always. In some environments, `www` may be under an entirely different a
by subway 8y ago
> while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people
Sometimes. Far from always.
In some environments, `www` may be under an entirely different administrative domain, with lesser authority than the top level domain which is delegating web services to the `www` group by way of creating a dns record and/or adding an http(s) redirect to the parent domain.
Having some string values arbitrarily considered trivial is dangerous.
See:
lbl.gov has address 128.3.41.146
vs
www.lbl.gov has address 35.196.135.136
The root domain points to hosts at the lab. The subdomain has been delegated off to Google.
- slg 8y agoIsn't that simply due to internal politics? Whoever owns foo.com might delegate www.foo.com to someone else, but they ultimately control both.
- ryandrake 8y agoEither way, www.example.com and example.com can differ in terms of IP address, underlying hardware, actual website content, and probably other things I don’t know. They are different URLs. It seems problematic to assume they are the same.
- wpietri 8y agoNot at all. People already assume they are the same. And they have for 20 years. Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs. Anybody clueful redirects one to the other. The only reason they're separate is that a) the web wasn't dominant when it was introduced, and b) technology of the time made it hard to manage traffic in ways we can now.
- ryandrake 8y ago> Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs. The third and ninth comments in the linked bug present real world examples of this behavior.
- wpietri 8y agoThe 9th comment is explicitly described as "bad results"; it's about somebody who doesn't have a redirect. So that for me is in the "unreasonable" category. The 3rd is about pool.ntp.org, which is a random ntp server, and which shouldn't be serving up web content. They did happen to pick www.pool.ntp.org as the URL for the docs on the NTP Pool Project, but if "www" never was a thing, the would have happily picked something else. E.g. poolproject.ntp.org or ntp.org/pool/ would have been fine.
- subway 8y agoIt's due to different groups controlling different parts of the infrastructure, allowing for separation of privilege -- and is the whole reason www even existed to begin with. Often these separate groups aren't part of the same organization. They're a different organization or contractor paid to maintain a web presence.
- slg 8y agoYes, but those are decisions made by whoever controls foo.com. This may not be a good decision by Google, but I don't think they should be held responsible for a decision that was made by whoever controls foo.com.
- muraiki 8y agoThis is completely backwards, because Google just made this decision _now_!
- wpietri 8y agoThis may be true for LBL, but it's not necessarily so. They don't serve different content, and I don't see anything running on lbl.gov that couldn't be handled. These string values are already considered equivalent, which is why Chrome is making this change, and why every reasonable site has one redirect to the other.