URL explained.....

[MysteryMan]

Hey.

I wanted to understand a few international issues of URL's.

I know what http is for....

firstly i want to understand why there are alterations and sometimes necessary exlusions of www in a URL (an http url that is, not ftp etc...)

what is the difference in excluding it, or using something like www2 or something

Also - relative to being in the united states, what is the reasoning for using country endings like .us or .jp

in the us if i go to google.com or google.us i get the same thing.

if i go to google.jp i get google in japanese

obviously .country endings are necessarily to that country, however what is the difference in going to a .com in seperate countries.

does it relocate that country to the relavent .country version ofthe .com

for instance does .com in the us go to .us and .com in japan go to .jp?

how does this work on a practical user level, and also on the URL information sent to............that place where information is networked........

thank ya

[liorean]

Well, first of all, a url is just a name.

"http://[subdomain.]domain.topdomain[/path]"

The domain.topdomain part is what you buy from your domain registrar. The subdomain is essentially whatever you want. The top domain may consist of one (e.g. .com) or two parts (e.g. .co.uk). Back to the subdomains, traditionally you used www for the web, ftp for ftp and so on - often in a way that associated one subdomain with one server. You may use them however you want, though. It might be that you use products.domain.topdomain for your products area, services.domain.topdomain for your services area and so on, on the same server. Or you may use different servers. You may even use different servers for the same domain and subdomain, selected by random, by load, by content negotiation etc.

In other words, it's just a name.


As for the country top domains, they are useful because of a number of different reasons. The first reason would be that you may want to have native language versions of your website for some countries. Or it may be because the domain name you wanted was already taken in other top domains. Or you may want to use a nifty name such as whatison.tv. Or it may be because of money reasons, or legal reasons, or because people in that country are expected to expect their country top domain.

[MysteryMan]

liorean - That really doesn't answer anything I aked I know all the information you posted already.

[WA]

Actually I think liorean answered more than a few of your questions except the "www2" part. Country specific extensions are just used for intuitive reasons when the user types them in. Most of them are handled by a central registry (networksolutions I believe still).

[MysteryMan]

Originally posted by WA
Actually I think liorean answered more than a few of your questions except the "www2" part. Country specific extensions are just used for intuitive reasons when the user types them in. Most of them are handled by a central registry (networksolutions I believe still).

So, if I am in japan and I go to .jp will I see the same as If I go to .com in japan?

And if I go to .us in the us will i see the same thing as if i go to .com in us?

Who handles the difference between .com's in different countries.

A know WHO handles them, but I don't know how they differ in handling.........

What if I am in the US but use a proxy that is in japan and i go to .com

will it show me the .com reached from japan, or the .com reached from the us???

[liorean]

That's up to the server, really. As I mentioned, it can do content negotiation, among other things. It can also do an IP lookup. It may or may not redirect you to another server, or decide to serve you a certain set of content instead of what you would get if you didn't come from that server. Essentially, that is up to each separate server, and has very little to do with the internet as whole.

As for the proxy, it depends on whether the proxy is pass-through or anonymous.




The top domains are all administrated individually and country independent - even the country codes. Any language detection and content negotiation is done on a per-server basis and not on a top-domain basis.

[shmoove]

Originally posted by MysteryMan
So, if I am in japan and I go to .jp will I see the same as If I go to .com in japan?

And if I go to .us in the us will i see the same thing as if i go to .com in us?

Who handles the difference between .com's in different countries.

A know WHO handles them, but I don't know how they differ in handling.........

What if I am in the US but use a proxy that is in japan and i go to .com

will it show me the .com reached from japan, or the .com reached from the us???

Your browser sends headers in the http request that tell the site your preferred language (the "Accept-Language" header if I'm not mistaken). So it doesn't matter what country you are in or what proxies you go through as much as the definitions on your computer. If you're on an English-speaking OS, chances are your browser is sending english as the preferred language. So the server can read this and redirect you to the most appropiate site (the .us one).
For the full jist on http you'll have to read through these 175 pages.

shmoove