Subj : The Open Root Server Confederation To : Rich Wonneberger From : Jonathan de Boyne Pollard Date : Sun Mar 18 2001 03:20 pm RW> Does this apply to not putting in the http:// in a name & it still works?? "http://" is not a part of the domain name. Don't confuse a domain name with an URL. A domain name is *one part of* a URL. Web browsers split URLs into several different pieces. RW> How about no http://www. (just say ibm.com) This isn't anything to do with search paths. "www.ibm.com." is the name of a host. The host has the name "www" within the domain "ibm.com.". But having one's HTTP server named "www" is merely a convention. (Just as having one's NNTP server named "news" and one's SMTP server named "mail", are.) There's nothing *forcing* that to be the name. Administrators have an *incentive* to use "www" as the name of the HTTP server, simply because some web browsers (/i.e./ HTTP clients) automatically prepend "www." and append ".com" if they cannot find the name that the user explicitly provided in the URL. (Some HTTP clients - Alas! This does not include Netscape for OS/2. - have a user-configurable mechanism instead.) But they aren't *required* to do so. The current trend is not to use "www", in fact. "ibm.com." is itself a perfectly valid domain name, and there's no reason that the host running the HTTP server cannot be named simply "ibm.com." rather than "www.ibm.com.". Indeed, the current trend appears to be away from names such as "news.example.corp.", "mail.example.corp.", and "www.example.corp." and instead towards having everything - maibox names, HTTP server, FTP server, and so forth - at simply "example.corp.". ( There is even a slowly growing undercurrent of voices wanting to go a step further and completely replace the current DNS with a system that takes a tuple comprising a name *plus a service type* and maps them to a set of one or more IP addresses. This means that users simply use the name "example.corp." and the client software, in conjunction with this hypothetical new name service, works out what the IP address(es) of the server(s) are using the type of service that is required. ) ¯ JdeBP ® --- FleetStreet 1.22 NR * Origin: JdeBP's point, using Squish (1:109/921.70) .