::shakes fist::
My favorite is sometimes when I’m on hold the announcements tell you to visit their website for faster service (would if I could have!). It reads out the URL to you like “double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com”
And if you actually type the “www”, you get redirected to the base domain without it.
In the early days of the internet that was actually the correct way to do things. Websites were supposed to be hosted at the www subdomain, while other content was supposed to go to places like ftp.whatever.com. Technically they should redirect thisstupidcompany.com to www.thisstupidcompany.com not the other way around. All that said though that concept has kind of fallen by the wayside as it became increasingly apparent that most hosts exist primarily to host websites with other uses as secondary so it became the norm to just assume the www when navigating to the root domain.
I remember listening to radio commercials in the early days where it was:
Aitch-tee-tee-pee colon, forward slash, forward slash, double-you, double-you, double-you, dot nameofthecompany dot com, forward slash, tilde - you know, that squiggly line on the key to the left of the number one on your keyboard, you have to press shift for it - and then the word ‘customer’.
double-you double-you double-you dot this stupid company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot _this stupid company_ dot com
This made me laugh way too hard for some reason lol
Hilariously, I bet it’s because their Active Directory domain is the same as their public domain, and it becomes a massive pain in the ass to hostname the root domain. Yes, externally you can do it just fine, but then it’s not consistent internally on their private network.
One solution is you run IIS (or any other web server) purely as a permanent redirect for the internal host, but it would then need to run on each domain controller which brings its own set of issues.
Is the DMV a .com or a .gov? Because it should be a dot gov — but Texas has stupidly put some of their government websites on dot coms.
It’s almost as if ICANN doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing anymore!
I am old and a little paranoid. I still use www. if it is indicated in a provided address, because in the past I have actually gotten different sites when using/omitting it.
When I try going to txdmv.gov, I don’t get the same server, but I do go to a machine that http-redirects my browser to www.txdmv.gov.
$ wget http://txdmv.gov/
--2024-04-10 17:01:26-- http://txdmv.gov/
Resolving txdmv.gov (txdmv.gov)... 168.44.227.138
Connecting to txdmv.gov (txdmv.gov)|168.44.227.138|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.txdmv.gov [following]
--2024-04-10 17:01:26-- https://www.txdmv.gov/
Resolving www.txdmv.gov (www.txdmv.gov)... 3.222.136.66, 18.234.22.91
Connecting to www.txdmv.gov (www.txdmv.gov)|3.222.136.66|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’
index.html [ <=> ] 203.91K 986KB/s in 0.2s
2024-04-10 17:01:27 (986 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [208802]
$
EDIT: Ah, apparently it redirects http://txdmv.gov/, but not https://txdmv.gov/.
considers
Based on @malloc@lemmy.world’s comment, maybe some browsers interpret a bare hostname without protocol specifier as an http address, and some as an https address.
maybe some browsers interpret a bare hostname without protocol specifier as an http address, and some as an https address.
And if you have a browser that does the former I would suggest finding a better one soon. The internet is moving away from unencrypted HTTP, a browser that doesn’t default to HTTPS nowadays is pretty strange.
