[X4U] Re: unnecessary www.prefix

[Stroller]

On 22 Nov 2006, at 20:28, Robert Ameeti wrote:
> At 6:06 PM +0100, 11/22/06, B. Kuestner wrote:
>> ...
>> Worse than that, the www is actually not needed in the first  
>> place. Go to http://apple.com or http://ibm.com. But people (and  
>> some browsers) often believe that www is necessary for a valid URI.
>
> As the owner of a domain, it is the responsibility to assign all  
> servers host names (www, ftp, etc.)

Um, the domain owner is permitted to assign that domain name as a  
hostname, however.

As Albitz & Liu put it:

    Domain names at the leaves of the tree generally represent  
individual
    hosts, and they may point to network addresses, hardware  
information,
    and mail routing information. Domain names in the interior of the
    tree can name a host and can point to information about the domain.
    Interior domain names aren't restricted to one or the other. They
    can represent both the domain they correspond to and a particular
    host on the network. For example, hp.com is both the name of the
    Hewlett-Packard Company's domain and the domain name of a host that
    runs HP's main web server.
    [section 2.1.2 of <http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dns3/chapter/ 
ch02.html>]
    (the diagrams on that page may help clarify.)

Apparently HP & I have something in common:

   $ host stroller.uk.eu.org
   stroller.uk.eu.org has address 213.152.39.90
   $ host compaq.stroller.uk.eu.org
   compaq.stroller.uk.eu.org is an alias for stroller.uk.eu.org.
   stroller.uk.eu.org has address 213.152.39.90
   compaq.stroller.uk.eu.org is an alias for stroller.uk.eu.org.
   $ host quattro.stroller.uk.eu.org
   quattro.stroller.uk.eu.org has address 213.152.39.93
   $ host funf.stroller.uk.eu.org
   funf.stroller.uk.eu.org has address 213.152.39.92
   $

In this schema my 5 IP addresses are assigned by availability,  
recycled when necessary; hostnames should be more memorable - funf is  
my G5, quattro is a quad-Xeon. The name of the zone is assigned to a  
computer, but that machine has an alias for convenience - from funf  
or quattro it is shorter to address "compaq" than "stroller.uk.eu.org".

Since many domain names - surely the vast majority? - are only used  
for serving web-pages (the MX record typically pointing at the  
hosting-provider's mail-server) there's really no need to name the  
web-server anything but the highest-level domain identity that he owns.

Stroller.