IE and use of WWW

[Max]

Some web sites need www, and some don't. I want to know if this is due to
their DNS not being set up properly, or is it something IE or Windows is
doing?

Example:
tsa.gov
www.tsa.gov


-M

 

[BC]

Neither.

 

[Tim Slattery]

Ya, it's the CNAME on the host's DNS that determines whether or not "www" is
needed. I just can't fathom why such a simple configuration is so often
overlooked, especially when "www" is seen by the public now that it is not
needed.

So the consensus is that the ONLY thing controlling this is the host's DNS?

The names in the DNS, yes. You're talking about a domain name, which
is simply the name of a computer. The Internet can't use this
directly, so it asks the DNS system to supply it with the IP (numeric)
address that corresponds to the domain name. Once it has the IP
address, it can communicate with the other computer.

So it's simply a matter of what name or names are in the DNS system.
It's become traditional to use the "www." prefix for computers that
run web servers, but it's only a tradition, you can use any name you
want for your computer. In my organization, for example, all computer
names must end with ".bls.gov". But before that, they can be anything
we want. Our public web site is available at both http://stats.bls.gov
and http://www.bls.gov. Both names are in our DNS machines, and both
resolve to the same IP address.

 

[Angela]

All that has been said about DNS plus it depends how the web server is
configured.
For example in Apache there needs to be a config entry for www.whatever.com
and whatever.com

Angela