Web navigation
Web navigation came about with the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1989 when Timothy Berners-Lee invented it. Once the world wide web was available, web navigation increasingly became a major aspect and role in jobs and everyday lives. With one-third of the world’s population now using the internet, web navigation maintains a global use in today's ever evolving international society. Web navigation is not restricted to just computers, either, as mobile phones and tablets have added avenues for access to the ever-growing information on the web today. The most recent wave of technology which has affected web navigation is the introduction and growth of the smartphone. As of January 2014, 58% of American adults owned a smart phone, and that number is on the rise from previous years. Web navigation has evolved from a restricted action, to something that many people across the world now do on a daily basis.
World Wide Web
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.