Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      If you didn’t mean the browser, then I don’t see how this makes any sense:

      if it’s not valid it will attempt to use the www subdomain and either give a 404

      What’s “it” here which is attempting something? It’s not the website since the address was not valid, and a website wouldn’t redirect you to a “www” if it wasn’t valid either and was going to result in a 404. So who’s “attempting” to unsuccessfully use the “www” subdomain?