The www-subdomain (WAS: Re: Patching settings.php)
2006/8/4, Khalid B <kb@2bits.com>:
On 8/3/06, Jeff Eaton <jeff@viapositiva.net> wrote: <zap>
I, for one, absolutely despise urls that don't have 'www' at the beginning -- the http://example.com style. It jst bugs me. I'd loathe having drupal default my sites to that style, but explaining the subtleties of how to specify your domain name makes things tricky.
I feel the opposite. The www prefix is redundant ... But that is a religious argument ...
I'd just like to point towards http://no-www.org/ for argumentation against using the www-subdomain. Do any of you have good links to [a] discussion[s] _for_ using the subdomain? (Apart from aesthetics?) -- Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen <http://freso.dk/>
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen wrote:
2006/8/4, Khalid B <kb@2bits.com>:
I feel the opposite. The www prefix is redundant ... But that is a religious argument ...
The www prefix is only redundant if you feel your domain exists only for the web. Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well and they may not be on the same machines.
On 8/3/06, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:
The www prefix is only redundant if you feel your domain exists only for the web.
Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well and they may not be on the same machines.
You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs. I have several such installations. This is pretty off-topic, but it's worth being right about the technical details if we're going to use them for the basis of drupal's behavior. Personally I'm with Freso - I see no point in the www and feel that the site should silently drop it if a user inserts it (much like drupal.org does). Regards, Greg -- Greg Knaddison | Growing Venture Solutions Denver, CO | http://growingventuresolutions.com Technology Solutions for Communities, Individuals, and Small Businesses
Personally I'm with Freso - I see no point in the www and feel that the site should silently drop it if a user inserts it (much like drupal.org does).
Ahahah. Holy crap. That's evil. This is already solved, isn't it? If you define a base_url, Drupal will force you to that. If you don't use a base_url, it's user's choice. But forcing a choice is obscene. -- Morbus Iff ( if i could change the future, i'd change the past instead ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
Personally I'm with Freso - I see no point in the www and feel that the site should silently drop it if a user inserts it (much like
And, for what it's worth, your beloved leader suggests tolerance, not blanket redirecting (though, yes, they refer to their "ideal" situation as a redirect): To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com. ... However, any site that takes in traffic one way or the other on both the www host and the bare domain are acceptable here. ... We understand that this sort of configuration is not appropriate for every website. For example, a domain may require the webserver to be stored on a different machine than the domain root server. ... In fact, several websites choose to forward traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com for branding reasons and that's just fine with us. As long as they don't simply block all HTTP traffic on the bare domain name, they're OK in our book. -- Morbus Iff ( the power of grayskull compels you! ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
base_url is not quite an acceptable solution. Consider a site with base_url set to http://example.com. Now suppose I go to http://www.example.com/?q=user. I provide my username and password, login get a cookie, etc. Then I get forwarded to example.com (no www) and I find I am not logged in. My cookie only works for www.example.com. Had I gone to www.example.com and followed a link to the login page, I would have been fine. Its a small tangent to an already tangential debate, but I just wanted to clarify that base_url alone does not address the problem. -Dave On Friday 04 August 2006 05:38, Morbus Iff wrote:
This is already solved, isn't it? If you define a base_url, Drupal will force you to that. If you don't use a base_url, it's user's choice.
base_url is not quite an acceptable solution. Consider a site with base_url http://www.example.com/?q=user. I provide my username and password, login get a cookie, etc. Then I get forwarded to example.com (no www) and I find I am not logged in. My cookie only works for www.example.com.
Right, in which case, you'd use the provided rewrite rules within the .htaccess (which you were referred to from the new docs for base_url) to manually force all your visitors to whatever domain you'd like. -- Morbus Iff ( united we're bland ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
base_url is not quite an acceptable solution. Consider a site with base_url http://www.example.com/?q=user. I provide my username and password, login get a cookie, etc. Then I get forwarded to example.com (no www) and I find I am not logged in. My cookie only works for www.example.com.
Right, in which case, you'd use the provided rewrite rules within the .htaccess (which you were referred to from the new docs for base_url) to manually force all your visitors to whatever domain you'd like.
To be more verbose: /** * Base URL (optional). * * If you are experiencing issues with different site domains, * uncomment the Base URL statement below (remove the leading hash sign) * and fill in the URL to your Drupal installation. * * You might also want to force users to use a given domain. * See the .htaccess file for more information. And: # If your site can be accessed both with and without the prefix www. # can use one of the following settings to force user to use only one # # If you want the site to be accessed WITH the www. only, adapt and # uncomment the following: # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC] # RewriteRule .* http://www.example.com/ [L,R=301] # # If you want the site to be accessed only WITHOUT the www. prefix, # and uncomment the following: # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$ [NC] # RewriteRule .* http://example.com/ [L,R=301] (Some words removed to prevent line wrapping). -- Morbus Iff ( for safety's sake, don't humiliate me ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well and they may not be on the same machines.
You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs. I
I don't think that's his point at all. "example.com" has no indication of what its usage is for. Your request would have to fall back to using ports to determine what service you're requesting - 25, 110, and so forth. Or, yes, the ubiquitous 80. For some people, that's absolutely fine, and yes, I use that shorthand when I type in website addresses, because I expect it to work. But if my svn server is on an entirely different machine than "example.com", using "example.com" won't get me there unless I do port forwarding on the example.com server itself. From a server architecture standpoint, I /do/ want www.example.com, mail.example.com, svn.example.com, and so forth to refer to the specific machines that power those ports. I treat "example.com" as nothing more than shorthand for the most /prevalent/ request, which is usually HTTP. The only way, however, to be assured that you are hitting my web server, my svn server, or my rsync server, is to specifically refer to it by its full name, being www., svn., or rsync. -- Morbus Iff ( and i twirled my hair and i popped my gum ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
Morbus Iff wrote:
Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well
and they may not be on the same machines.
You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs. I
I don't think that's his point at all.
Morbus, you said it better than I did, and I wish I hadn't sent a msg at all =)
On Fri, August 4, 2006 7:32 am, Greg Knaddison - GVS said:
On 8/3/06, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:
The www prefix is only redundant if you feel your domain exists only for the web.
Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well and they may not be on the same machines.
You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs. I have several such installations. This is pretty off-topic, but it's worth being right about the technical details if we're going to use them for the basis of drupal's behavior.
Personally I'm with Freso - I see no point in the www and feel that the site should silently drop it if a user inserts it (much like drupal.org does).
Regards, Greg
My personal network has garfieldtech.com on one server, and www.garfieldtech.com on a completely different server on a different network in a different timezone. garfieldtech.com is in my living room and runs my email and jabber server, while www.garfieldtech.com is on a shared host at a professinal hosting company. Going to garfieldtech.com in a browser currently gets you a "welcome to apache" page, I think. :-) No, www.example.com and example.com are NOT the same thing. That's a very overly-web-centric view. DNS is used for a lot of things besides just HTTP routing. That said, I'll "me too" on using whatever the admin uses to access the install page, as that's a pretty good guess as to what the admin wants. Either that or just using the default directory. --Larry Garfield
Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:
You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs. I have several such installations. This is pretty off-topic, but it's worth being right about the technical details if we're going to use them for the basis of drupal's behavior.
No, I'm saying that 'example.com' may not exists just for the web. I didn't say anything about flexibility, I'm talking about allocation of resources. I have mail.example.com I have ns.example.com I have gopher.example.com (Ok I don't actually but maybe I might) I have news.example.com Why does the WWW service get promoted directly to example.com? To save people from typing www. a bunch? Because 'www.' costs a lot of money in advertising? C'mon. The reasons that guy gives are utterly spurious. These are hardly valid.
Personally I'm with Freso - I see no point in the www and feel that the site should silently drop it if a user inserts it (much like drupal.org does).
-1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 MY domain. MY choice. I respect your choice to set your domain up the way you like. Force me to do this and I'll turn into a green monster and rampage all over you. This' *E VIL*.
On 8/4/06, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:
MY domain. MY choice. I respect your choice to set your domain up the way you like. Force me to do this and I'll turn into a green monster and rampage all over you. This' *E VIL*.
So, just to be clear (since apparently it wasn't). I don't think anyone suggested that the installer drop the www from the domain that the admin provides. I know I didn't. Thanks, Greg -- Greg Knaddison | Growing Venture Solutions Denver, CO | http://growingventuresolutions.com Technology Solutions for Communities, Individuals, and Small Businesses
2006/8/4, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com>: <zap>
Why does the WWW service get promoted directly to example.com?
No. The HTTP service gets promoted directly to example.com:80. Equally so would example:70 reach the Gopher service, example.com:119 would be news/NNTP service, and so on.
To save people from typing www. a bunch? Because 'www.' costs a lot of money in advertising? C'mon. The reasons that guy gives are utterly spurious. These are hardly valid.
I never type www unless I know from experience that I have to. Personally, I don't mind as much if people use www.domain, as long as domain:80 will redirect there. I also prefer only having to enter domain for other services (ie., not mail.domain or jabber.domain or what have you), relying on ports to have the destination server serve me the proper content. -- Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen <http://freso.dk/>
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen wrote:
2006/8/4, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com>: <zap>
Why does the WWW service get promoted directly to example.com?
No. The HTTP service gets promoted directly to example.com:80. Equally so would example:70 reach the Gopher service, example.com:119 would be news/NNTP service, and so on.
Again, that assumes that www.example.com and example.com are even the same machine. There is no rule that says they need to be.
I was talking about HTTP only, hence port 80 (by default). My point was that a subdomain (www) is redundant. You can still run DNS and Mail on other machines, or on the same machine. Why force users to type www when they don't? I still alias all my domains in Apache (ServerAlias) and DNS, because so many people still insist on typing that. On 8/3/06, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen wrote:
2006/8/4, Khalid B <kb@2bits.com>:
I feel the opposite. The www prefix is redundant ... But that is a religious argument ...
The www prefix is only redundant if you feel your domain exists only for the web.
Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well and they may not be on the same machines.
Why force users to type www when they don't?
I'm not suggesting we do. I'm suggesting we let the user or the administrator decide, not forcing it as a default in core. This is not a Drupal issue at all. -- Morbus Iff ( tomorrow never comes until it's too late ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
participants (7)
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Dave Cohen -
Earl Miles -
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen -
Greg Knaddison - GVS -
Khalid B -
Larry Garfield -
Morbus Iff