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Digital Literacy How the Web Works The World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee and URLs

Yasmine Yuma
Yasmine Yuma
1,486 Points

I know it may seem like a stupid question, but - does the "www." part of the URL have a particular name?

I thought about that when Joy explained clean URLs and said they're only made of the domain name, noticing they omit the "http://" but saying nothing about the "www.". I figured they're omitted because it's basically just a way to say it's a website on the World Wide Web and that's it, but I ask, again, do they have a specific name besides being an acronym?

2 Answers

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points

It's called the "Subdomain".

It goes with the second-level domain and the top-level domain to form the resource name.

And the "http://" part is called the protocol.

Jesse Schoonveld
Jesse Schoonveld
2,943 Points

It's a subdomain. it's used to distinguish the web site of a domain from the FTP server or mail server (which would be ftp.example.com and mail.example.com, etc).