www......http: ????

[harbir]

Hello guys!!!
Basically i am newbie to all this, i have a question and i wonder if someone of you can help me.

most of the time we type www.<site name> in the browser for opening up the site, but at times we type http:<site name>, like for one of my Uni sites.

Please can anyone tell me why is this, why is www. used or why is http: used???

Regards
Harbir

[nihil]

As I understand it, the full address would be http://www.<site name> That tells you it is a World Wide Web site and it is using Hypertext Transfer Protocol. I think that your browser assumes this and fills in the missing bit, because I have just tried both on AO and it takes me to the site, having completed the address box in full, in the navigation bar.

I suspect that if it is a private/internal site, it is just http://?

Other possibilities that spring to mind are ftp:// which is File Transfer Protocol, and the addition of an "s" (https:// etc) which indicates a secure site.

I am sorry that I am no expert, my comments are just based on my casual observations

[sec_ware]

Hi

I think, we have to deal with two separate issues here

1. The protocol

As nihil pointed out, the text before the :// refers to some protocol and/or
tells the browser what to do:
Like (sorry for paraphrasing):
http: check on the following address port 80
https: check on the following address port 443
ftp: check on the following address port 21
file: check on the localmachine for the file ...

2. the address
(apart from file://)
The text after ://...

The whole thing that follows, like www.google.com or google.com, points to an address.
The IP address is different (test it using ping), but both sites will return the google
search engine mask on port 80.

The subdomain-IP (subdomain.domain.com) addresses are part of the DNS entry on the DNS server managing
your domain (simply spoken).

You can also forward all subdomain-IP's to one and the same IP.
There, using http1.1, you can configure a web-server (eg apache)
send different "homepages" according to that address ("virtual hosting").
like
joe.myplace.com
will point to another directory than
john.myplace.com.


And, as nihil already said (sorry for repeating again )
nowadays, the browsers interpret what you have typed to the most
probable choice. like
google -> http://www.google.com

www is a standard for a website.
other standards are/were/would be

ftp.google.com -> would resolve to the ftp server
mail.google.com -> would resolve to the mail server
...

Cheers