It’s about time we kill the “www”. I don’t mean the World Wide Web, obviously, but the three letters that appear at the beginning of a plethora of website addresses.
Seen from a human perspective they serve very little purpose these days. Sure, many people believe they are required - and in some cases they are due to technical oversights - and will happily enter them in the address bar.
It could be argued that they make it easy to recognize a website address. I agree, everybody recognizes “www.example.com” as a website address. However, my guess is that people are just as likely to recognize “example.com”. The dot and the 2-4 letters following it are what makes a website address - both on a technical level, but also in peoples minds.
The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.
– Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999
There is, however, at least one situation where you want to put the www in front of your domain name: When writing website addresses in an email or online forum or anywhere you can’t or won’t manually create a link.
The abbreviation provides an excellent hook for text to HTML parsers to grab on to and turn your address into an actual link. The alternative is using “http://” in front of the domain name and while computers might love that, it’s ugly and not terribly friendly to your fellow human beings.
Obviously websites should still respond when there’s a www in the domain name, but they should never require it.
For all intents and purposes, just forget that www ever existed in your domain name. Only use it when there’s a benefit, and in a year or so, think back on all the keystrokes you’ve saved, and remember where you heard it first; on mentalized.net.
I agree 100%. My site accepts www but redirects to the site without it. My business cards have no www.
My wife insists on putting www in her browser every time for ANY website. I keep telling her she doesn't need to. 99% of sites work without it.
I'm with you on this, but users are just stupid. They just are. Just this week I pointed a colleague (a software developer) to 'app.projects.company.com', and I watched her typing 'www.app.projects.company.com', it's just stupid.
I wouldn't necessarily call it stupidity, but they have indeed been trained to enter the www - and why wouldn't they think it's needed when they see it everywhere?
Good point, I will try to change it where I can, starting with my own webpage.
Calling users stupid is just ... well, stupid ;o)
I agree all these www are useless. It is like a shibboleth...
http://no-www.org/ has been preaching this for over 5 years...
And how's that going for them? ;)
Touche my friend...
The point of the 'www' bit is to let net users and DNS administrators know what service a box is running. Our pretty ancient system of resolving names can only point to machines, there's no indication of their services unless that service is email.
You can choose the version without www if you like, if you take a look around you'll find that most people do that at the moment anyway but don't advertise it. I expect that the reason for that is popping microsoft.com on a business card looks like another version of the company name rather than an address, diluting the all-important brand delivery.