Letter: Letters : No short cut

From Andrew Daviel

Vancouver, Canada

Matt Chatterley writes that the use of “www” in Web addresses is unnecessary
(Letters, 20/27 December, p 81).

Not quite. While for some sites www.xyz.com is an alias for
xyz.com, for others it is not. Given a location xyz, Netscape will
first try to find a local address for xyz, then a global address, then an
address for www.xyz.com before making a Web request. Thus typing
IBM works, but IBM.com doesn’t.

Sites in other top-level domains must be entered in full (though one can omit
the http://).