www

[mr.han.man]

why do you still have to type in 'www' all the time?

[IndieSinger]

You don't... type in 'yahoo.com' and watch it take you to 'www.yahoo.com'. You can also type 'yahoo' and hit Ctrl and Enter and the 'http://www.' and the '.com' part are inserted automatically.

[iwbus]

Because www isn't always right. If, for example, I want to modify my fotopic site I go to http://my.fotopic.net/ so there's no www in the address anyway

[stevie21]

because some browsers can be used for downloading using ftp so it needs to know which protocol to use.

[j2buttonsw]

You use http: to determine the protocol to use. The real reason is that you are in fact connecting to a computer on the domain. For example server.mydomain.com is the full DNS name of a computer called server on the mydomain.com domain. Since people use all sorts of names to call their computers the www was introduced for continuity. So www.mydomain.com is a computer called www on the mydomain.com domain. http://www.amazon.com is a computer called www on the amazon.com domain and you are connecting to it using the http protcol. Not everyone (in fact hardly anyone) has a computer called www on the domain as you tend to have an alias for the webserver (which contains all the web site content) called "www". As has been said, some domains don't have a www root, in the iwbus example you are connecting to a computer calles "my" in the fotopic.net domain.

[kmac12345678]

yout dont if u want google or sumin jsut type google.com it works fyne