Re: GPL'd euphoria/URIs
Ted, Irv, Andy et al.
First of all, sorry about the delay. Been out all Sunday (!).
Now
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Fines" <fines at macalester.edu>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: Re: GPL'd euphoria/URIs
> I think getting into RFC specs about URL parsing is not quite the right
way
> to go about why www.something.com works and something.com does not. You
> need to learn more about how DNS works. In short, www.something.com and
> something.com are two completely different names, just as /usr/bin and
> /usr/bin/junk are two completely different directories.
Are you sure? Every doc I've ran into tells me that your domain is -in your
example- "something.com" and nothing else. There's no mention at all of any
"www". Last year I registered a name at NicAr (the Argentine Nic), and all I
was asked was a) the top level domain (i.e. ".com"), and b) my domain name
("bartix"). I can indistinctly reach it typing http://www.bartix.com.ar or
http://bartix.com.ar.
So, no, Irv. I don't believe anyone would cheat your clients out of their
registered domain names. Andy Cranston seems to be right on that. However,
this seems to apply only to "www." My site is hosted on Freeservers, who
tell me that http://www2.bartix.com.ar is available.
> Suppose I have something.com registered in my name, and I run my own DNS
> server there. I also have an assigned range of IP addresses,
> 167.54.13.9-20. I set up several boxes, with these example IP addresses:
>
> www.something.com 167.54.13.9
> something.com 167.54.13.10
> ftp.something.com 167.54.13.9
> mycrap.something.com 167.54.13.10
> euphoria.something.com 167.54.13.11
> web.something.com 167.54.13.9
> teds.folly.something.com 167.54.13.19
>
> First, note that I can have several names pointing to the same IP address.
> I have my ftp and www services running off of one machine, two other
> services off of another, and a third I name my euphoria server, and so
on...
But that's right, and in no way conflicts with what I said. Your addresses
are always IP addresses. URLs are just a convenience, and must be resolved.
It all depends on how your NIC, intervening name servers and ISP and/or
website server software resolve the IP addresses.
> So if a user tries to access www.something.com, it will work. However, if
> they try to access something.com, it will ALSO work, but they'll get a
> different web server altogether! They're both valid URLs. A trick I
might
> want to do is to run a web server on something.com that does one thing
> only: redirect all requests to www.something.com. That way, users trying
> either URL would get to the same place.
Or, maybe, they would get nowhere, if one of the assigned nodes pointed
nowhere, e.g. to a nonexistent server, or to one that was down. In fact, the
Harborside main page points out that they are in the middle of a website
reorganization, to be finished by the end of April. If you look at their
source code, the navigation menu links on the left all point to
http://www.xyz. URLs (none of which work), while the links within the text
point to http://xyz URLs, which do work. In fact, if you paste the former
onto your browser's address box and delete the "www." string, they will work
fine too.
> Putting 'www' in front is just a convention, not a requirement. I could
> buck the system and remove my www.something.com entry entirely, and people
> would have to use web.something.com to access my site. But that would be
> dumb. Likewise it would also be dumb to just have a DNS entry for
> something.com, but not www.something.com, as anyone trying
> www.something.com would get an error if no DNS entry existed.
Which seems to me what they're doing ...
> Someone wrote:
> > The same goes for the .com suffix (or any other). As far as IETF is
> > concerned, you can call your site http://whatever. It should work, as
long
> > as the intervening name servers will resolve it.
>
> This is just not true. The root node is ".". Top-level domains are com,
> edu, org, net, mil, gov, int, tv, and so on. Were Internic to run a web
> server off of the com DNS server, then typing http://com could work. But
> they don't. That's why http://whetever doesn't work: you're trying to
> access a web server on a top-level domain that just doesn't exist.
> No one organization or individual owns the top-level domains; they are
> managed by Internic. Our ability to specify a domain begins at the next
> level down: something.com; myschool.edu, etc. Were you to register
> mydomain.com, that doesn't at all mean you have mydomain.edu. (For a
great
> example of this, try http://www.whitehouse.gov and
> http://www.whitehouse.com.) So if you type in http://mydomain into your
> browser, it won't resolve, at all. Never has, never will. I think IE and
> Netscape may try some helper methods, by trying to tack .com onto the end
> of what you typed, or www. onto the beginning, or by looking up what you
> typed in a search engine, but that's not name resolution, that's just an
> application trying to be smart.
>
> --Ted
Yes, browsers (MSIE, Netscape) will assume .com, won't they? I've just
tested it on IE 5.5. Entered http://www.yahoo and got www.yahoo.com. Then I
entered http://yahoo.com and got there too, though it took a little longer.
Typed http://yahoo and got nowhere. Then just www.yahoo and go it real fast,
and the address box said "http://www.yahoo/", without any indication of
toplevel domain. Browser stuff.
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