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Is there some alternative to www? Is there a separate secret web that uses "aaa" or "zzz"? If not, why isn't the www part just w, or even not needed?
When we reach for a web site, why do we have to put www.(name).(domain). Why isn't the "www" part automatic?
WWW stands for World Wide Web, and it designates that you are looking for a World Wide Web site. In the early days of the Internet, there were several different protocols available (Gopher being the most prominent that comes to mind). Some of the protocols were free to use and some were pay as you go. A company may have had several different sites posted for the different protocols, so your WWW specified which protocol you were using. The World Wide Web was always a free system, and with the development of NCSA Mosaic, the first really good graphical browser for the WWW protocol, WWW took off.
These days most people think of the Web and the Internet as being the same thing, but actually there's a lot going on on the Internet that has nothing to do with web pages. think of your email - it goes over the internet, but it's not sent using the WWW protocol. FTP, the file transfer protocol, is also different from WWW, and isn't directly supported by most web browsers. And then there's the Usenet and IRC (Internet Relay Chat), which run on their own protocols, but are still on the Internet.
These days, www also designates that you are seeking the root web and not a subweb (www.yahoo.com as opposed to mail.yahoo.com). If you do type in just yahoo.com, the hosting server will refer you to the root web at www.yahoo.com. So really, the only reason we use www now is because it's a part of the internet culture.
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