<P> Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long - standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide . The hostname of a web server is often www, in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server . These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com . The use of www is not required by any technical or policy standard and many web sites do not use it; the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch . According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners - Lee, the popular use of www as subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page, however the DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending www to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied . Many established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such as www2, secure or en for special purposes . Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (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 . The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers . Since, currently, only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root . </P> <P> When a user submits an incomplete domain name 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 Firefox, when it still had the working title' Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx . It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices . </P> <P> In English, www is usually read as double - u double - u double - u . Some users pronounce it dub - dub - dub, particularly in New Zealand . Stephen Fry, in his "Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh . 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". 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 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 capitalised, with no intervening hyphens . Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when Web 2.0 web applications sought to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable . As the mobile Web grew in popularity, services like Gmail.com, Outlook.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com are most often mentioned without adding "www ." (or, indeed, ". com") to the domain . </P> <P> The scheme specifiers http: / / and https: / / at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure, respectively . They specify the communication protocol to use for the request and response . The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as passwords or banking information . Web browsers usually automatically prepend http: / / to user - entered URIs, if omitted . </P>

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