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Why have web pages dropped the www?
I don't know where to put this question, if here or in ~tech, but I chose here due to I want a response for someone who doesn't know all about internet.
So my question is: why there is a trend of removing the www of every web address? why it was standard in the first place and not now?
There are a handful of popular web pages that don't use a triple w in their link and they have replaced it or removed it. Tildes, for example, doesn't need triple w. Why?
It only made sense to have the www when humans tended to interact with domain names in more ways than just through the web. In 2021 a non-technical user may very rarely see an email-related subdomain when setting up an email client. So maybe a pop3.gmail.com or an smtp.something.or.other. Every other domain name you see can be assumed to host a website.
Back in the day a website at www.stanford.edu would have lived side-by-side with ftp.stanford.edu for file transfers, imap.stanford.edu for email, and maybe many other services. Pretty much everything moved onto the web in the last 20 years so the www became redundant. The internet and the web aren't the same thing, but they're getting closer to identical every day.
This is a great answer.
I'd add that redirects and address bars that double as search bars mean that you get to your destination anyway, because of the points mentioned above.
There is a real reason to keep the www in current_year. You can’t use a cname on your domain and use it for email at the same time without www.
This is useful if you want to use a static site host like GitHub or GitLab. Without the www you either have to not have email or other sub domains, or hard code the IP address and stay alert for changes.
I always assumed that hosts should typically remain on a static IP address. Have you been in scenarios where your domain is on a dynamic IP?
The Gitlab Pages IP address changes every few years as they move it between servers. They try to keep it static but if you move cloud providers there isn't any option. It just means your page goes down until you fix it but if you use a CNAME you will have no issues.
Issue is if you set a CNAME on the root you can no longer set MX or TXT records on the entire domain and you can not create subdomains.
This doesn't appear to be an issue to me with CloudFlare as my DNS provider, or I'm not following you correctly.
I think that's because CloudFlare is doing this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-compliant-cnames-at-a-domains-root/
Wow, that's such a nice solution to the problem that just works without needing a new spec.
That definitely would explain it, cheers!
Wow, this was the comment that made me realize why
wwwis considered a subdomain when I would read documentation on DNS. Would find it confusing when it would be referred to as subdomain and I would logically think, "no, that would be a domain like www.abc.standford.edu". That wouldn't work either when I think about it.Reading their explanation about it that alphamule linked above, they don't need anyone to support it. When someone requests DNS records, if there's a CNAME record for the root domain they'll chase it down until it resolves to the final A record and then return that. According to them it works transparently and without issue, it was the old solution (Screw the standards, just let people use CNAMEs with other records on the root domain) that had plenty of edge case issues.
The other comments here are great, one additional thing I wanted to add, though, is that your perception of sites dropping the www may be artificial: many browsers have started to hide it in the URL bar even if the www is actually present.
You can test this with reddit.com actually. On mobile safari for example, it will display in the URL bar as “reddit.com”, however the actual fully qualified domain name being used is “www.reddit.com”, which you can see by tapping on the URL bar. I believe Chrome does this as well.
Oh yes I know Chrome has started that bad habit, but I use Firefox exclusively so I don't experience that.