[Web4lib] A very basic quesiont on library home page URL format

[Mike Taylor]

> Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 09:30:41 -0700
> From: "Erik Adams" <EAdams at sheppardmullin.com>
> 
> > Is there any reason why, since it is our 
> > main entry point, that the library
> > home page shouldn't just be referred to as 
> > http://library.umassd.edu
> 
> Technically, no.  As others have pointed out, the "www" prefix is a
> historical holdover from the early days of the web.

This is really not true.  (I ignored it the first few times it was
asserted, but I can't bear it any longer :-)  There was no reason to
use "www"-prefixed domain names in the early days of the web that does
not also pertain today.  The concrete reason to do so is so that you
can, if you wish, run the web-site on a physically distinct machine
from that which provides other services, e.g. FTP repository, SSH
login, IRC relay.  If you use separate hostnames for these services,
then you can run them either on the same of different machines -- the
choice is yours.  But if you use the same hostname for each, then
you're stuck with a single box doing all of them unless you want to
mess about with fancy routing.

The best approach is probably to use www.whatever.tld as your official
web-site address, and arrange to have a web-server on whatever.tld as
well that redirects all requests to the corresponding page on
www.whatever.tld, so that people who omit the leading "www" get what
they want (as opposed to what they deserve :-)

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
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