Double-U, Double-U, Double-U.

September 02, 2003, 05:09 pm

Much like many adults think that kids my age have no idea what a record is or why we say “dialing the phone” (referring to rotary phones), I imagine most people on the Internet don't know why the naming convention www.blah.com was started.

The first thing you have to understand is that the World Wide Web is just one service that is run on the Internet. Other services include FTP, SMTP, and DNS.

So if I had some computers on the Internet, I might not have web services running on all of them. In fact, it's still common to see machines with names like ftp.blah.com, mail.blah.com, or dns.blah.com meaning these machines primarly serve files with FTP, serve mail, or run DNS.

Similarly, machines were named www to indicate that this is where the web services were hosted. Jeff was always a proponent of calling this server web instead of www, because instead of speaking nine syllables, you would only have to speak one. I don't think it's important anymore. If you go to blah.com, I think you should see their web services.

I guess it's not surprising to imagine that most people think the Internet and the web are the same thing. Hell, I'm sure most people think AOL, Yahoo, or Google are the Internet.