'www.' is indeed just a convention but it is not a "traditional" thing of the past that should go away - it's meaning is still as well defined and useful today as it ever was - sub-domains are very plainly a way to distinguish one machine or service from the various other services that may be offered under the base domain anme (which is often not associated with any server), and to allow each machine or service to have a it's own IP address (perhaps at different physical locations), while remaining semantically associated under the umbrella of the main domain name
in the case of the 'www.' sub-domain in 'http://www.foo.com', that clearly identifies the HTTP "World Wide Web" server of foo.com - as distinguished from it's FTP server ftp.foo.com, it's mail server smtp.foo.com, it's usenet server news.foo.com, and so on - some domains have only a web server and so there is no confusion if there is a 'www.' sub-domain or not; but to assume that as the default case is to assume that every client that asks for 'foo.com' should always get a World Wide Web server, which is to ignore the plethora of other services that can be offered under the same domain as well the possibility that foo.com may have no web server at all
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