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?
No — that prefix tells the OS which application to direct the address to.
The www., ftp., mail., etc. are on the server side, so the client gets directed to the correct computer owned by the domain owner.
To some degree, this quickly became irrelevant when virtual hosting became a thing; you could have something watching on the server side that would see an attempt to connect to port 80 or port 443, check the domain the client is looking for, and redirect them to the right internal or external IP address.
With the onset of CDNs, it became even less meaningful since load and availability balancers will now decide what computer will eventually receive the request.
All you really need is the URI (https://) and the port (:443) and everything else can be a black box.
Why don’t we see :80 and :443 on URLs anymore? Because a web browser, when it handles the URI request, auto-maps to the default ports for that URI unless it is explicitly told to use another.
As a result, you can enter example.com into a browser address bar, and you’ll automatically be taken to [https://guest@www.example.com/ :443/] but all you’ll see on the browser bar is example.com.
[edit] hah; even Lemmy is munging my URLs to remove the bits it deems unnecessary.
Use backticks to tell us exactly without Lemmy attempting to correct you or parse anything
becomes
https://www.example.com/