hutcheson - 10:30 pm on Jan 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

>www is a sub-domain? I didn’t realize that. I always thought that it more of a reference to the protocol type being World Wide WEB. Like ftp.mydomain.com or gopher.mydomain.com and what ever the news server is.

That is a convention, and (as you had noticed) in the old days, many larger sites set up a separate server (computer) with its own subdomain name running the server (program) for each protocol. Now, quite frequently one computer runs programs for multiple protocols or multiple websites -- or at least, one publicly visible router hides all the various servers.)

The significancs of omitting the "www" logically ought to be "hey, this server runs all the protocols we need." But it's only one convention; there are other conventions in use these days; and there's nobody to punish rogue webmasters whose subdomain names are chosen at random.