Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?
because it used to be necessarily, and it ICANN reformed stuff years ago, so now it’s not. it’s also why you can have all sorts of weird new suffixes you coudln’t before.
you can look it up on the ICANN history website of web standards.