www2, what's it all about?

[Maljonic]

I've read a bit about this www2 thing, more interactivity and such I think. But what's it really all about, why are some sites now using www2 at the start of their address? Isn't that just more hassle for the user, to type in an extra 2 to get to a site?

 

[Alan]

I've read a bit about this www2 thing, more interactivity and such I think. But what's it really all about, why are some sites now using www2 at the start of their address? Isn't that just more hassle for the user, to type in an extra 2 to get to a site?

I think you may be just be getting confused with the DNS name of a site, it doesn't matter what you name your webserver, most people use WWW but you dont have to eg http://news.bbc.co.uk

I recently moved my web hosting onto a different box, and used a hostname of www2 to aid transition as filtering DNS through the net takes a few days and I didnt want people to point to the old redundant box.

 

[Maljonic]

Yeah I know, but a lot of sites have started making their addresses look like this http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/gardenstate/ for instance, where just typing www etc redirects to www2 and so does leaving out the www and adding a www. before the www2 goes nowhere.

I just wondered why they're doing it, to look more cool or something. Or to show they've done something different to the site?

 

[MYstIC G]

i'd figure that's because they're set up to use more than one server box, like ebay with its 100 odd cgi servers

 

[Whipped]

Surely it's something to do with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_2

 

[Maljonic]

Surely it's something to do with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_2

Bloody Hell, that looks well scary.

 

[Whipped]

Bloody Hell, that looks well scary.

I hear it was a pretty nasty time

 

[Louster]

Do you mean Web 2.0? To be honest I've never really "understood" what it's about, and reading that article I'm inclined to agree with the last bit of the opening blurb (though technically I'm not "part of the development community" but whatever, hur):

Some members of the development community see Web 2.0 as an overly vague buzzword, incorporating whatever is newly popular on the Web (such as tags and podcasts), without having any fixed meaning.

 

[Maljonic]

That's what I mean, I wonder if these people are sticking www2 at the beginning of their URLs because of the over-hyped buzzwords web 2, trying to look all front line, cutting edge, avante guard et cetera...

 

[JingleBells]

ah web 2.0, the second dot com bubble IMO, companies which seem to have no business model. as Louster says, it's all just buzzwords and dial-up unfriendly javascript

 

[Shovel]

As has been said, ‘Web 2.0’ is a buzzword to cover… well… something. The positive interpretation is use of gracefully degrading, keyboard accessible JavaScript, open data, APIs and interoperability. But you're hard pushed to find ‘Web 2.0’ sites that live up to that.

As for the ‘www2’ domain prefix… odd. I've never heard of people using that for ‘Web 2.0’ sites. There I have seem it used is for server load balancing. Each server is numbered and you get redirected to a different server so they'll have www1, www2, www3, www4 and so on.

That said, I wouldn't put it past some idiot marketeer to think that using ‘www2’ was somehow clever. Remember though that most people don't know what Web 2.0 is, so it's a disaster strategy if that's what's really happening.

Of course, you don't need to have any domain prefix at all.

 

[SheepCow]

It's more than likely some very bad load balancing. Normally you load balance transparently...

 

[Escape]

web 2.0 brings to mind a future without an international internet. Countries will tax foriegn connections to their web servers(a result of hyper-inflated energy costs).

Governments will take control of ISPs and start to control outbound connections(based on technology developed by China) to ease the spiralling costs of hosting an internet. With autonomous, localised internets, secret services will monitor everything and everyone.

Coordinated, underground networks will spring up across the globe to establish Web 3.0, a return to the good old days of the WWW(1). So begin the "hacker wars", heralded by numerous sequels and remakes of War Games, scripted by a concerned government.


But that's all some way off, yet...

 

[Gef]

I thought Web 2.0 was all about building web pages from the client side, using Javascript and whatnot to gather data from the users end, thereby reducing load on the servers.

It is a bit of a buzzword, but I can see the positives, if it will catch on or not who knows..

 

[Shovel]

I thought Web 2.0 was all about building web pages from the client side, using Javascript and whatnot to gather data from the users end, thereby reducing load on the servers.

That's Ajax, which is a particular application of JavaScript (and the XmlHttpRequest object invented by Microsoft). It's the use of JS and XmlHttp to dynamically update fragments of a page without reloaded the entire document.

Web 2.0 is sometimes seen as synonymous with that, but also with use of Web Standards, proper CSS layout, feeds, open data, tiered financial subscription models, replacing desktop applications with browser-based applications… but because it's such a wooly concept, none of those are required and many of the ‘poster children of Web 2.0’ fail on many of those counts (Flickr uses tables for layout, Gmail is a technical travesty).

For developers like us it's better to focus on technology: Ajax is a technology, Web Standards are a technology, Open Data is a technology, feeds are a technology. If you're dealing with people who deal in buzzwords then Web 2.0 can be your friendly umbrella term for your technical ambitions but if someone asks you to build them a ‘Web 2.0’ site, unless they cite RDF you'd best be asking for clarification and writing a watertight requirements brief.

 

[SheepCow]

If they mention RDF you should prepare yourself for namespace hell