WWW prefix

Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, as it is ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of such subdomain names is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch, and many web sites exist without a www subdomain but most established websites prefer to use them, or they use some other name such as "www2", "secure", etc. Most web servers are set up such that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.
www is a very useful tool for load-balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that point to a cluster of load balancing servers. Since only a subdomain can be cname'ed the same result can not be achieved by using just the domain root.
When a user submits an incomplete website address to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering 'microsoft' may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003. It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.
The scheme specifier (http:// or https://) in URIs refer to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and to HTTP Secure and so define the communication protocol to be used for the request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the encryption involved in HTTPS adds an essential layer if confidential information such as passwords or banking information are to be exchanged over the public Internet. Web browsers usually prepend this scheme to URLs too, if omitted. Berners-Lee has acknowledged that the two forward slashes (//) were originally unnecessary.
In overview, RFC 2396 defines Uniform Resource Indicators to have the following form:

<scheme>://<authority><path>?<query>#<fragment>

Here <authority> is for example the web server (e.g., www.example.com), <path> identifies the web page on that server, from just '/' for the root page to longer paths in the form common on Unix-like operating systems. The web server processes the <query>, which can be data sent via a form, e.g., terms sent to a search engine, and the returned page present the result. Finally, <fragment> is not sent to the web server. It identifies a tag to which the browser positions the page.
In English, www is pronounced by individually pronouncing the name of characters (double-u double-u double-u). Although some technical users pronounce it dub-dub-dub this is not widespread. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," with Stephen Fry later pronouncing it in his "Podgrammes" series of podcasts as "wuh wuh wuh." In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "myriad dimensional net", a translation that very appropriately reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens.

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