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www, Domain Names, DNS, and IP Addresses
Posted by Bill Venners on May 10, 2000 at 11:03 PM
> Hi, > Can any body tell me what is the signifiance of "www" in URL. > For eg. www.artima.com. But some sites don't have this www added > to their url. for eg. http://java.sun.com > what is difference between these two urls ? > Any guidance will be appericiated. I believe the initial prefix before the first dot allows the owner of a domain, such as "artima," to get more IP addresses for their domain name. I've never done this so I don't know exactly what the procedure is, but I think I know what the result is. Basically, when you type in a domain such as www.artima.com, into your web browser's URL field and hit return, the browser goes to a Domain Name Service (DNS) and looks up "www.artima.com." What comes back, with luck, is an IP address that the browser then uses to actually contact the host that can help it satisfy your request. Once web sites get big, or have unrelated material, they often set aside a different IP address for each category, like mail.yahoo.com or java.sun.com. I assume this helps those web sites distribute the load coming to their big web site, and can also serve as mnemonic for users actually typing explicit URLs into browsers. bv
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