Web browsers don’t need “http://” and the use of “www.” depends on the DNS record. DNS maps website names to IP addresses, allowing communication between computers. Some DNS records include an alias for the “www.” prefix. DNS records can be modified to capture all traffic.
Current versions of popular web browsers do not require http:// to be entered in the address field when browsing the Internet. However, whether or not a website requires www. it does not depend on the browser, but on the Domain Name System (DNS) record for that domain.
Web browsing is made possible by a massive cooperative effort based on a common language or set of protocols. All computers connected to the Internet follow these protocols in order to communicate with each other. When a surfer clicks on a hyperlink or manually enters an address into their browser, they connect to the DNS database to look up the relevant DNS record. The record contains the name of the website, such as www.wisegeek.com, and the corresponding numerical address, known as the Internet Protocol (IP) address. Every computer on the Internet must have a unique IP address so that pages can be sent by web servers and received by surfers.
Some DNS records contain only one version of the domain name. For example, a DNS record might only contain www.example.com and not example.com. In this case if a browser enters the latter, no match will be found and the browser will freeze or return with an error message. If the browser changes the address to www.example.com, the DNS record will be found. Now the browser will get the IP address and connect to the host server to request the desired web page.
Many domains today are created without the “www”. preceding the address, negating the need to type it into the browser. The DNS record for that site will list the domain name as example.com. However, some browsers add the “www” prefix out of pure habit. To route this traffic as well, the DNS records of these sites commonly include an additional entry called a CNAME. This tag maps an alias to the primary domain name. The alias, in this case, would be the longest, “www.example.com”. With this type of DNS record, a surfer reaches or not the site “www”. It is inserted.
DNS records can be modified to include a mapped alias. If the site was created as a subdomain on a host server named “www”, it can only contain www.example.com in the DNS record. If you want to change your DNS record to capture all expected traffic, contact your domain registrar.
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