Following the instructions on how to configure a custom domain for a GitHub pages project site, the requirement is to add both a series of A records pointing to GitHub’s IP addresses. Additionally one can also add a CNAME record to redirect the www subdomain to the apex one. There is a great set of answers related to this topic already, but I had an additional question: Why not just redirect www.example.com to example.com via a CNAME record, instead of doing what GitHub states which is to redirect www.example.com to .github.io also via CNAME record? Would it make a difference?