Oh, and typing "http://" is superfluous as well. Modern browsers add it for you. (edited for grammar)
Dave
· 2 years ago
Agreed typing "http://" is also superfluous. As is adding "as well" after "also" =)
Grammar lunacy aside.. If people type http:// it's a probably good thing. That likely means they also type https://. Which is something we all should be doing when we want to make sure ssl comes into play.
Far too many people get hit by the assumption that even though the page they're visiting was delivered to them by http, that the login forms on the page will use https.
David Precious
· 2 years ago
Maybe I'm old-fashioned but I prefer to see the www there. Perhaps it's because I see a website as just one of the many services which a domain may offer, so using www makes it immediately intuitive what www.example.com will resolve to - it'll be the webserver(s) for the domain, whereas ftp.example.com will point to an FTP server, mail.example.com will be a mail server, gopher.example.com will be a Gopher server (remember them?) etc....
Tim F.
· 2 years ago
to David Precious:
The point is that it's intuitive without the superfluous www. If a company has a domain, they're most likely going to have a web server and a mail server (both of which can use the base domain, thanks to the magic of MX records).
I personally assume that if there isn't a pre-pended "ftp" or "gopher" or other service identifier then it's a URL for a web site.
On another topic... Daniel, you need to fix this comment box. It's too wide and the google ads overlap it.
Daniel Miessler
· 2 years ago
David, since 99.99% of the time one puts a domain into a browser it's for HTTP traffic, the default should be to not include the hostname. This doesn't preclude using one for specific services such as FTP, etc.
the www. part of an url/uri is simply one step down the naming hierarchy. saying i should be dropped, because "its shorter" just makes you look stupid. i agree, that if left out modern browsers or the server should redirect me to the www. version. but providing no www. version at all would make the web much more complicated to a lot of the average users i know. (and its simply wrong from a dns and url schema point of view)
also saying "www" is only in english very long. in german i can do it easily in under a second :)
sp
· 2 years ago
regardless of personal desire for "clarity" by some people, the use of subdomain hierarchy is useless. people just fear change, more so when they "think" they're right.
Daniel Miessler
· 2 years ago
fdemmer, since 99.99% of the time one puts a domain into a browser it’s for HTTP traffic, the default should be to not include the hostname. This doesn’t preclude using one for specific services such as FTP, etc.
Brian Faust
· 2 years ago
Agreed. I find it interesting to look at which companies use WWW on their TV commercials. Usually, the more hip the company, the greater the chance it drops the www-prefix. In my opinion, it looks better in print without it.
Also, in-person testing of inexperienced surfers for years has shown me one of the most common mistakes that is made is typing only two WWs or four WWWWs by accident - which leads adults/less experienced users to freak out and think the site is "broken."
bob-o
· 2 years ago
I've long tried to make any site I run support both, although my current host insists on the no-www version forwarding to the www one.
Anywho, if you use the new-Zoom way of saying it just say "triple w" it goes super fast.
Daniel, I really enjoyed your post and agree with you 100%. In most cases, "WWW." adds typographical and verbal complexity without any benefit. A perfect example: once, I had OfficeMax produce a rubber stamp for my business. They formatted the URL as "WWW.pcpete.net", with capitalized "WWW" despite I had put every character as lowercase. The clerk explained that using capitalized "WWW." was proper grammar, and tried charging me for stamp even though it wasn't made the way I asked. So is there a cost to using "WWW."? I suppose so! But aside from that, think about advertising, where time is money: in a 15 or 30 second spot, the act of merely saying "www." takes at least one second. I encourage all my clients to use "Class B" no-www compliance level as it provides the best balance of usability and both forward- and backward-compatibility. Plus it's not like you can't just create a subdomain anyway for other services (e.g. mail.pcpete.net). Great article!
Bart
· 2 years ago
I feel that, in print, one should at least write "http://" or "www.". Both should indeed not be necessary, but who would recognize "dmiessler.com" as a website? Well, apart from you.
It makes mentioning that it is a website unnecessary.
justin
· 2 years ago
@fdemmer: According to the No-www Wikipedia page, "No-www is an initiative to make all websites accessible from both the http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ forms of their names." The goal is to allow people to go www-less without fear. You're free to use www if you wish.
Bill Sempf
· 2 years ago
No only are existing services to be considered, but we must look to the future. What a pain it will be for companies to embrace the next new thing without a top level domain.
Michael
· 2 years ago
I'll have to second that typing http:// is valuable. We're entering an age now where RESTful services will become more plentiful, and :// is becoming a common notation in technical circles for a variety of URI naming and addressing schemes. It ain't just for the web surfer's benefit ;)
Dan
· 2 years ago
"providing no www. version at all would make the web much more complicated to a lot of the average users i know. (and its simply wrong from a dns and url schema point of view)"
fdemmer is wrong here. It is not at all wrong from a DNS point of view. Any DNS domain, except one that has a CNAME record, can have an A record. The DNS itself makes no distinction between 'host names' and 'domain names'. Furthermore, DNS provides SRV records for exactly this purpose, such that a web site, and FTP site, an IMAP server etc can all be referred to as simple 'example.com', and the client would retrieve the address and port number of the appropriate server.
It's also not wrong as regards URLs. The authority part of a URL only needs to be a domain name with a record that eventually resolves to an IP address, be that A, CNAME or SRV. (Your mileage may vary by browser.)
Olivier
· 2 years ago
I heard someone pronounce "www" as "dub dub dub"
Casey
· 2 years ago
I don't remember ever having to type "www" or "http://" in as many years as I have used the internet. This seems to be the standard way Mac browsers work. It seems like this would be an easy change on PC browsers which have a URL field that seems to act as a redundant search field when dropping the "www" or "http://"
Mike
· 2 years ago
If we get rid of the www just because most web traffic in a browser could work fine without it, what happens when something else becomes more popular?
Just tell people whatever URL you want to tell them and redirect it to whatever you want it to point to.
Sasha
· 2 years ago
The problem I have with www isn't that it's three extra letters, but that it's nine extra syllables for something that should only take three to say (World Wide Web). (MIT's website, for example, has always been web.mit.edu.) What's the point of an abbreviation that takes longer to say than the phrase itself?
Kyle
· 2 years ago
The www portion refers to a specific computer at the domain example.com. It is a required piece of information. That you don't typically have to type it, is as a result of the DNS administrator creating a "wildcard" entry on the domain, or specifically adding an entry that points to the www computer when no www is typed.
mike
· 2 years ago
The www is a pain agreed, but it does make larger corporations with many internal sites DNS lookups easier. We wildcard it if unrecognized internally but if the www is there it saves the internal search. May not sound like much but lots of them a day add up. For ISP's with a completely seperate public network and DNS servers for their customers what you are saying makes perfect sense. In this scenario should default to http as well, unless using an encripted site
jive
· 2 years ago
Problem is that some servers are still set to where you can only pull up the domain if you put in the www. I see that quite often as I dont put in "www.", while browsing but if the site doesnt come up, its usually because the server was configured to require it.
Daniel Miessler
· 2 years ago
@Kyle
You say that www is needed because it points to a specific host, but ALL DNS records point to a specific host. The idea here is for example.com to point to 1.1.1.1 just the same as www.example.com does now.
This is not a major shift; it's simply a call to shed some legacy baggage.
cornfused
· 2 years ago
wwwhat is wwwrong wwwith www?
Juno
· 2 years ago
Years ago when websites were first being referenced in the media, I would agree with you. There was too much use of www, and eventually, people referred to just the domain names and finally the concept of ``dot com'' to reference the explosive internet expansion. Nowadays, I prefer to use http:// or www prefixes as is suitable. When seeing others use these prefixes, I only see it as bad taste if I come away with the sense that the person or company using them feels it is required to use them. As long as I'm reasonably sure they know its an option, then I could care less which direction they go with.
pufone
· 2 years ago
This is bullshit! www = world wide web . I can use the domain name for other purposes hence the non-www form. Take www.nasa.gov for example. They will never use http://nasa.gov for world wide web display.
Mike
· 2 years ago
Yeah! It's "wubble-oo wubble-oo wubble-oo", by the way. Only ignorant neophytes confuse 'www' for three w's.
And I'd also like to see all URLs quoted with a trailing slash too, so as to lessen the load on our poor webservers...
Christefano
· 2 years ago
This conversation reminds me of a poll that the BBC did years ago. It didn't catch on for whatever reason, but it was voted that "hitweb" was the best abbreviation for "http://www".
I agree with Bart that the "www" is important when used in print. In other media, such as TV ads, it's understandable to not to use it because it's clearly a web address when there's no other contact information.
Raju
· 2 years ago
Check my web site http://www.commandengine.com/, I am proposing natural language based URL. For example, If my name is foo,
My web site URL I can have like, "visit foo personal web site"
If California tourism department can have "discover california"
Always a verb + predicate phrase,etc.
Send Your thoughts.
Chaz
· 2 years ago
I don't see why anything has to change. It's great to promote that web sites have a proper DNS entry for their root domain. However, almost every web site these days has that set up already.
Subdomains still play a role with many sites. The nice thing about the whole domain name system is that you can have it both ways. I see no problem with telling people to visit google.com, with www being assumed unless otherwise specified, thanks to Google taking care to impliment an A pointer for the google.com root domain.
Also, it is a very rare thing to see sites that have public-facing subdomains which point to individual servers. Most often they point to some sort of clustering system, load balancer, etc. The entire system is fairly well abstracted. I'd personally prefer it if we primarily connected to website services by special DNS records than by subdomains, such as with MX records. This would all but eliminate subdomains from the majority of public-facing sites.
Mirage
· 2 years ago
With regards to the amount of time it takes to say double-you double-you double-you, just saying wub wub wub seems to be quite popular (at least among folks in South Africa), or even dub dub dub.
Mark Baker
· 2 years ago
You need to consider the cost too; it duplicates the number of URIs the site has to publish, thereby reducing cache efficiency.
I think the current mechanism of letting browsers guess what you mean is probably the best option, all things considered.
Jason
· 2 years ago
Um... it's not deprecated. Subdomains? Also - what would FTP sites do, and what would differentiate a www page from something else?
skipper coogan
· 2 years ago
click in address bar type "cnn" or "yahoo" or "whatever" +
Julian
· 2 years ago
I think www is still useful, for example in google you can look for pages in www.example.com. But when there's just example.com it will search forums.example.com, too. And the hierarchy thing is important, too. If you seperate traffic to lets say www.example.com, media.example.com and so on you can speed up your site.
Eric
· 2 years ago
While I'm normally in favor of such nitpicking/simplicity, as the number of domain suffixes increases, I think the "www" is a nice way of indicating a URL. While most people would recognize "johndoe.com" for what it is, "johndoe.name" is a different matter. Hell, I have a not-entirely-uncommon ".cc" domain, and half the people I give it to think it's a typo.
Connor
· 2 years ago
WWW indicates a world wide web site. You can also have ftp.something.com or forums.something.com. WWW isn't superfluous, but I agree that if you leave it off, you should be directed to the www site by default.
Ernie Oporto
· 2 years ago
Why stop there? TLDs are just a money making gimmick. There is no regulation about what goes into a .org or .net so why not just basically make it one big internet keyword system. I want to go to Slashdot or Digg, so just type that in the address bar and you will see http://slashdot or https://digg
Samuel Tardieu
· 2 years ago
As Dan noted, it would be ok if browsers were able to use the "_http._tcp.domain-name" SRV record. The reason for the "www" is to be able to indicate on what machine the web server is, which may not be the same as the one that you want "domain-name" alone to be (because, for example, you want to be able to "ssh domain-name" to get to your router).
Moreover, SRV records let you specify not only the host to use but also the port, with priorities when using redundant servers and so on. So no, please do not drop "www" right now, instead fight for having SRV records recognized in browsers.
Tim
· 2 years ago
Personally I don't think it matters, as long as you use one or the other, and redirect the one you don't use. Search engines will index your site better if there is only 1 url for it.
For web addresses that aren't .com, the www part may be essential to indicate it's a web address, eg: bla.st If I placed an ad in the newspaper for that site, I don't think the general public would realise it's a web address, but the www would make it more obvious: www.bla.st
Unfortunately I've found people will still type www.bla.st.com which just doens't work. I've also found if I tell people "Go to bla.st" they type www.bla.st. Even sites that work off subdomains eg. tm.powersite.co.nz people will type www.tm.powersite.co.nz
Regarding the time it takes to say "www"... since "w" is the typographic contraction of "uu" (and "vv" before there was a separate "u",) and since three times two is six, and since "w" means "double-u", wouldn't the proper shorthand way to say "www" be "sextuple-u"? That's much faster to say aloud that "double-u double-u double-u." For example, "sextuple-u dot n-p-r dot org"?
Web Design Chester
· 2 years ago
All for this one it is such a waste of time!
sim
· 2 years ago
>Bart Says: (July 25th, 2007 at 11:03 am): I feel that, in print, one should at least write “http://” or “www.”. Both should indeed not be necessary, but who would recognize “dmiessler.com” as a website? Well, apart from you...
dear god. is there anyone who would NOT recognise dmiessler.com as a website?
>It makes mentioning that it is a website unnecessary.
when you see 012 3456 7890 would you need it explained that it's a telephone number?
other than that: interesting discussion. a pointless storm in a teacup of course but diverting nonetheless. for the uber-geeks amongst you the www might matter as a matter of intellectual consistency. i hate to explain you're fighting a loosing battle outside the matrix (the english language anyone? hell, in the states you folks even stick w/feet & inches!) but if it makes more sense when you're talking geek-speak, go for it. the fact remains though that in general audience publishing, advertising, etc, it is ugly, useless, wastes space and is, for anyone who has actually used a browser for more than 15 minutes, patronising. i edited a (fairly insignificant) magazine once and we dropped it. now, loads of ppl do, and one day everyone (outside of specialist tech publications) will... that being the case, how much better off would we be if everyone who stuck a no-www link on their page put a link to an anti-poverty site? just a thought.
qbit
· 2 years ago
if the server doesn't have the proper dns configuation it may or may not work without the www. I had to make a special request for the hostmaster at universtiy of michigan to correct their dns zone files for the school where i work. you can't just drop the www and expect it to work. you will find some sites still don't have that set properly.
i agree though, what a waste of time. i just say "dub dub dub" or something.
qbit
· 2 years ago
oh dude... akamai is a piece of c4ap. you shouldnt be using that thing anyway. i block all images from them.
Rob
· 2 years ago
This is stupid. You should redirect non-www to www. Proof? Enter http://google.com/ and see where you get. Since Google doesn't care about how their site ranks since they are the ones DOING the ranking, none of you can say they are doing it for "PageRank". This should be proof enough that the www version is better.
jason
· 2 years ago
I have always advocated for the word 'web' in place of www. Easier to say and more descriptive to boot.
I heard a guy say "Dubs dot..." I understand that we're not just talking spoken language, but I support no-www. I mean who uses V6 or V8 when talking cars anymore? Or cylinder for that matter. "It's got an 8 in it" usually suffices, to mention that it is a 5.0 is the real important info, right?
This works for most sites. But sites like http://nvidia.com don't put anything on the main domain, and only map their website to the "WWW" subdomain. Same with http://asus.com you have to put http://www.asus.com or you don't get the website.
Me
· 2 years ago
Brilliant. After over a decade, newcomers finally realize what was a practice until idiots (mainly marketing idiots) had to capitalize on "www" because they did not have a f'in clue. This is not news. It is just the result of stupidity and ignorance.
nri
· 2 years ago
but we should force the USA websites to add .us
Jesse
· 2 years ago
If you're going to drop the www make sure to put in a redirect. Don't allow them both to resolve to the same resource. From an SEO standpoint you're weakening the authority of your content by allowing both to resolve without a 301 redirect.
Jaswah
· 2 years ago
dub dub dub....
Jaswah
· 2 years ago
dub dub dub...
Jss
· 2 years ago
and may I also add. this \ is a backslash. This / is a slash ... if there were such a thing as a forward slash it would be this _ aka and underline.
Emily
· 2 years ago
From a communication design standpoint, I find www useful as a visual call-out. It indicates to the recipient that there's something more to do after reading the note, something to come back to. "url.com" is more likely to be processed visually as a component of narrative.
Adam
· 2 years ago
If they want to use it let them :P I personally haven't said www. in a very very long time. Some people that don't really know that much about computers get confused if you leave it out.
james
· 2 years ago
> You say that www is needed because it points to a specific host, but ALL DNS records point to a > specific host. The idea here is for example.com to point to 1.1.1.1 just the same as www.example.com > does now. > >This is not a major shift; it’s simply a call to shed some legacy baggage.
not all DNS records point to a specific host, I think you meant to say 'all DNS "A" records point to a specific host'. The existence of a domain does not require there to be an A record for the bare domain name (or any A records at all, in fact). Adding an A record for 'domain' would be adding unnecessary baggage if a 'www' A record existed for serving web content. In addition most MTAs use a domain 'A' record as a fallback if an 'MX' record is not found for a domain. This use of domainname A records would break under 'no-www'.
BLOGMYWAY.org
· 2 years ago
I don't think it's necessary to forgo the www. Just left it alone, and for whoever like to use it still, just type in like you normally do (www). If you are a lazy person, then you can just always type in the domain name only.
Mrvandemar
· 2 years ago
I have found that some broken SMTP servers don't properly lookup mx records and instead will follow the A record or CNAME. This causes mail from them to us to fail because they try to send it to the webserver instead of the mail server (two separate machines). It doesn't matter that it is against the SMTP RFC, they are still coded wrong and causes much distress when we get our customers complaining because they can't get mail from person X that uses one of these broken MTA's
kuhsay
· 2 years ago
If you type a domain name in the location bar, for instance, ebay, and hit control-enter, it adds the www. and .com for you.
ctl-shift-enter .org shift-enter for .net
I've only tested this in Firefox.
Eddie
· 2 years ago
ctrl-enter works for IE and FF
Shade
· 2 years ago
i run DNS for more than 80 domains, as well as several dozen more subdomains of those. I personally hate having to create an additional record both in DNS and a Alias record in apache for all the "www" records. I do that because I want as many people as possible to find all my sites, even if they are retarded enough to type in www.blog.mysite.com instead of just blog.mysite.com.
Some other things I hate about the differences between www. and no-www:
1. cookies set for www.example.com are not necessarily available to example.com, or vice versa. mileage varies depending on browser. i hate that.
2. when you purchase a SSL cert for your domain name, you either have to purchase one only for a completely different domain (which is what I usually do), like secure.mydomain.com, or you have to purchase one for mydomain.com AND www.mydomain.com. Some SSL providers are not providing wildcard certs, where you could use one cert for both cases, but it costs a lot more for that kind of functionality. again, i hate that.
Shade
· 2 years ago
Oh yeah, and funny that even this site ONLY highlights/auto-hyperlinks domains that begin with www.example.com and not other subdomains, like blog.example.com, or just example.com. :)
Nick Johnson
· 2 years ago
Some hostname in front of the domain name is necessary to make cookies with domains set work properly. While this may be of little concern for many sites, for others it matters.
If you set the domain "foo.bar" on a cookie, it won't be sent (by a compliant browser anyway) when accessing http://foo.bar/ due to the way the RFC is worded, but it would be sent to http://www.foo.bar/. Again, this only matters if you have multiple web hostnames, but many sites do. (Like static.foo.bar, beta.foo.bar, test.foo.bar, forums.foo.bar and so-on).
Cookies without domains are only sent back to the web server that set them, which means a cookie set from http://foo.bar/ could never be sent to any other hostname either.
None of this matters if you don't set cookies, of course.
Personally, I like to call most of my web hosts "web".
Shade
· 2 years ago
i used to work in ISP tech support and we would get old people who would think they needed to put the "www." into their email address. :) iamdumb@www.ishouldnthaveadomain.com
Shade
· 2 years ago
and lastly... as a manager of a lot of DNS... i think CNAME's are bad. they create unnecessary traffic. so i give all records, A, MX, whatever, the IP address. in fact, dnsreport.com frowns on the use of CNAMEs.
Snowy
· 2 years ago
I remember back in the day you had to type "Http://www." and capitals mattered. or so we were told.
Mega Uber Tron
· 2 years ago
Thanks for blogspamming digg!
Your concise and informative article was a refreshing change from the usual drivel.
It is unfortunate however that most people here have no grasp of the URL concept
Brien
· 2 years ago
this is a joke.
browsers already do this.
just press Control as you hit Enter.
...omg you are all such sheeples!
Sinesurfer
· 2 years ago
Geeks never used the triple "W" prefix, you'll notice that geek sites such as slashdot.org (not only has a difficult to pronounce domain name) but never used a prefix. As for the http vs. http secure debate, geeks known when to use a http secure protocol prefix and realise that web browses assume http as the transport protocol.
Congratulations, generic users finally understand a geek behaviour (from the early nineties).
yessuz
· 2 years ago
not all the websites work without www!
chris
· 2 years ago
domain.com will resolve to the default A record for the domain, however, this may be a different address to what www.domain.com will resolve to. Typically, they are the same but not always.
www. might be a little old school for some, but oh well ;-)
ken
· 2 years ago
I never understood why www was used to begin with. It would have made so much more sense to use "web" instead. One syllable.
Dave
· 2 years ago
You're well behind the curve on this one fellah.....
web.org.uk
Simon
· 2 years ago
Keep up at the back :-)
Gaz
· 2 years ago
Wrong. www is required, there are other services available through a browser, www is just one of the standard web server ones.
Assassin's Creed
· 2 years ago
Well, I'm all for the whole 'no-www' movement. I don't find going with either to make a massive difference, it's just more for preference.
Steve
Gaz
· 2 years ago
The web is only one part of the internet. If you're too dumb to use it go play with sticks or something
kL
· 2 years ago
TCP/IP ports are for distinguishing different services from each other and user doesn't even have to know about it.
everyone wants to go to american sites most likey so just drop the .com if the dommain.com is not found then try .co.uk .net .org etc in summary drop the www drop the http:// drop the .com
Tonym
· 2 years ago
Will browsers/email programs etc be able to identify URL's and convert them into hotlinks if you drop the www ?
meninwbe
· 2 years ago
memals, I agree with the first two. but not the last.
I will agree only with www can take out, but some where some issues will arise in the programming world, that is sure
Paul
· 2 years ago
You guys have such strong feelings - I have no problem using the web and neither do my children aged 8 an 6. Although, one thing does annoy me - When you see an alphabetical list of countries on a web site that has the USA at the top. I've met some American people and I'm sure that they could find their way down to the countries starting with 'U'.
veewpe
· 2 years ago
no www for me!
aaaaaaa
· 2 years ago
This is just idiotic. www is a cname and the idea is that the website should not be defined by the name of the domain. The way it should be used properly is so that the cnames are descriptive of the site you are going too. For example: blog.example.com, wiki.example.com, or www.example.com.
Kotjze
· 2 years ago
I never type "http://" or "www.", except for one site where it won't work without "www."
me
· 2 years ago
With Mozilla, you don't even have to type a ".com."
Cifra -wwwSnob
· 2 years ago
Oh come on people. NOBODY CARES
Arslan
· 2 years ago
How about typing in the name of webste only like : yahoo and press ctrl+enter browsers add all the required stuff themselves [:P]
Levi Blackman
· 2 years ago
My website has been accessible via both www and no www for a while now. I agree, all websites should take advantage of this feature, and I think most do.
For some reason though, maybe out of habit, I still type the full http://www.mywebsite.com when coding and making links.
RETARDED
· 2 years ago
this is RETARDED, why not just use numbers, since they are faster to type in?
Berto
· 2 years ago
Well, using the same reasoning you don't need any of these:
You could use 'domain.com' in all cases... if all services are under the same IP.
If you have, say, 'smtp.domain.com' then you can change the SMTP server IP if you need to and no one will notice it.
However if everybody is using 'domain.com' for everything then you'll have a problem if you want any of these services to be in another host.
The internet is more than the world wide web.
KMXZ
· 2 years ago
Unless your company's only service is HTTP to access a web site, keep the www. If your company is primarily an email service; having domainname.com == mail.domainname.com would make more sense.
If you really hate the 3 w's, just keep one w. http://w.dmiessler.com Gives you the benefit of distinguishing your www stuff from your ftp stuff; and if the two extra characters bug you that much, you save 2/3 of them.
Ivan
· 2 years ago
ccny.cuny.edu does not work unless you type in www.ccny.cuny.edu. Ridiculous...
Ivan
· 2 years ago
To add to that, your blog's comment script does not convert ccny.cuny.edu to a link automatically, but it does so for www.ccny.cuny.edu. How would a script recognize that I am typing in a web address unless I typed in http:// or www?
Jesus
· 2 years ago
This is exactly why most people should keep their opinions to themselves
Cifra -wwwSnob
· 2 years ago
They should build a website called use friggin .htaccess! mod_rewrite for ever
Jerry Seinfeld
· 2 years ago
I agree with this movement
Lunacite
· 2 years ago
I do phone tech support, and the majority of the time I tell them to go to "mail.yourdomain.com" to get webmail, they end up at "www.mail.yourdomain.com" Annoying to no end.
Well, the www performs a real and useful purpose for me. I have my own internal network with multiple systems. I have a gateway with a single static ip address that is visible to the internet. My router port maps various incoming connections to specific different machines on my internal network (http, smtp, etc.) I also have my own DNS servers. On my internal network, my dns servers map (whatever). to my specific internal ip addresses that are not visible to the outside world, but the map (for example) www., mail., smtp. etc. to my public static ip address. So, a dns lookup that just specifies will resolve to one of my internal network addresses, none of which are directly reachable from the public internet, while a dns query for www. will resolve to my public address - reachable from the outside world. I think this shoots down the idea that the www. prefix serves no purpose and isn't needed.
Bear
· 2 years ago
Oops. I see my comment above doesn't read very well because I didn't think and used characters that were interpreted as invalid html tags and were dropped. I should have used something like [mydomain] instead of (open chevron)mydomain(close chevron). (whatever). should have been (whatever).[mydomain] and www. should have been www.[mydomain]. Sorry about that.
Daniel Miessler
· 2 years ago
@Bear
It doesn't shoot down the idea. As I said in the piece, the concept isn't to abolish hostnames -- only to point the root of the domain to the main web content. And by the way, you can just do the same with your setup as well. Send the external DNS queries to your internal DNS server, and point the root to the IP address of your web content. This isn't a discussion of eliminating options -- just changing default behavior.
But the purpose is not to say what's best for everyone, but rather what's best for the Internet and its users in general.
Keith
· 2 years ago
I have to agree with this story. It is perhaps time to drop the "www" prefix to domain name, as they simply serves not much of a purpose. I have started trimming off the www on some of my sites, and I find that they work equally well.
However, it is best to careful when switching from a "www" domain to a non-www domain name, as it may temporarily result in a loss of traffic and page indexing on search engine. It has to be done with extra care. You definitely will not want to result in loss of traffic.
Chuck
· 2 years ago
I recommend using uuuuuu instead of www. The existence of a "w" has peeved me forever. I mean, we don't have a "double-o" or a "double-e", right? Just how hard is it to continue to hold the key down, anyway?
Dean
· 2 years ago
Just get everyone to stop saying "double-U" three times and make up a new word for it, or we could say "triple-double-u" at only five syllables (Nearly a 50% savings!) or "six-u"; that's only two syllables (Over 75% OFF!) Seriously, what do we do about those who insist on typing www-dot in front of every address even when you don't say it?
Website Design Chester
· 1 year ago
An interesting topic of discussion here. I agree with "PC Pete" in the fact that using the "www" in print makes it clear that a website is being referenced. The thing that still amazes me is that most people still type a web address into a search bar instead of a the browsers address bar!
Luke
· 9 months ago
Some domains might have multiple websites physically hosted on separate servers. For example:
They all use the same protocol, HTTP, so there would still need to be some other distinction to identify which machine any particular request is actually referring to.
In this case, I suppose the bare string "mysite.com" could be treated as a synonym for one of the three depending on their relative popularity, and traffic could be rerouted accordingly. But the other two servers would have to retain their individual unique names.
All Comments
Oh, and typing "http://" is superfluous as well. Modern browsers add it for you. (edited for grammar)
Grammar lunacy aside.. If people type http:// it's a probably good thing. That likely means they also type https://. Which is something we all should be doing when we want to make sure ssl comes into play.
Far too many people get hit by the assumption that even though the page they're visiting was delivered to them by http, that the login forms on the page will use https.
The point is that it's intuitive without the superfluous www. If a company has a domain, they're most likely going to have a web server and a mail server (both of which can use the base domain, thanks to the magic of MX records).
I personally assume that if there isn't a pre-pended "ftp" or "gopher" or other service identifier then it's a URL for a web site.
On another topic... Daniel, you need to fix this comment box. It's too wide and the google ads overlap it.
or simply missunderstood by the no-www guys?
how about this example:
www.mygreatcompany.com
forum.mygreatcompany.com
irc.mygreatcompany.com
ftp.mygreatcompany.com
the www. part of an url/uri is simply one step down the naming hierarchy. saying i should be dropped, because "its shorter" just makes you look stupid. i agree, that if left out modern browsers or the server should redirect me to the www. version. but providing no www. version at all would make the web much more complicated to a lot of the average users i know. (and its simply wrong from a dns and url schema point of view)
also saying "www" is only in english very long. in german i can do it easily in under a second :)
Also, in-person testing of inexperienced surfers for years has shown me one of the most common mistakes that is made is typing only two WWs or four WWWWs by accident - which leads adults/less experienced users to freak out and think the site is "broken."
Anywho, if you use the new-Zoom way of saying it just say "triple w" it goes super fast.
It makes mentioning that it is a website unnecessary.
fdemmer is wrong here. It is not at all wrong from a DNS point of view. Any DNS domain, except one that has a CNAME record, can have an A record. The DNS itself makes no distinction between 'host names' and 'domain names'. Furthermore, DNS provides SRV records for exactly this purpose, such that a web site, and FTP site, an IMAP server etc can all be referred to as simple 'example.com', and the client would retrieve the address and port number of the appropriate server.
It's also not wrong as regards URLs. The authority part of a URL only needs to be a domain name with a record that eventually resolves to an IP address, be that A, CNAME or SRV. (Your mileage may vary by browser.)
Just tell people whatever URL you want to tell them and redirect it to whatever you want it to point to.
You say that www is needed because it points to a specific host, but ALL DNS records point to a specific host. The idea here is for example.com to point to 1.1.1.1 just the same as www.example.com does now.
This is not a major shift; it's simply a call to shed some legacy baggage.
www = world wide web . I can use the domain name for other purposes hence the non-www form. Take www.nasa.gov for example. They will never use http://nasa.gov for world wide web display.
And I'd also like to see all URLs quoted with a trailing slash too, so as to lessen the load on our poor webservers...
I agree with Bart that the "www" is important when used in print. In other media, such as TV ads, it's understandable to not to use it because it's clearly a web address when there's no other contact information.
For example, If my name is foo,
My web site URL I can have like,
"visit foo personal web site"
If California tourism department can have
"discover california"
Always a verb + predicate phrase,etc.
Send Your thoughts.
Subdomains still play a role with many sites. The nice thing about the whole domain name system is that you can have it both ways. I see no problem with telling people to visit google.com, with www being assumed unless otherwise specified, thanks to Google taking care to impliment an A pointer for the google.com root domain.
Also, it is a very rare thing to see sites that have public-facing subdomains which point to individual servers. Most often they point to some sort of clustering system, load balancer, etc. The entire system is fairly well abstracted. I'd personally prefer it if we primarily connected to website services by special DNS records than by subdomains, such as with MX records. This would all but eliminate subdomains from the majority of public-facing sites.
I think the current mechanism of letting browsers guess what you mean is probably the best option, all things considered.
type "cnn" or "yahoo" or "whatever"
+
And the hierarchy thing is important, too. If you seperate traffic to lets say www.example.com, media.example.com and so on you can speed up your site.
Moreover, SRV records let you specify not only the host to use but also the port, with priorities when using redundant servers and so on. So no, please do not drop "www" right now, instead fight for having SRV records recognized in browsers.
Search engines will index your site better if there is only 1 url for it.
For web addresses that aren't .com, the www part may be essential to indicate it's a web address, eg: bla.st
If I placed an ad in the newspaper for that site, I don't think the general public would realise it's a web address, but the www would make it more obvious: www.bla.st
Unfortunately I've found people will still type www.bla.st.com which just doens't work.
I've also found if I tell people "Go to bla.st" they type www.bla.st.
Even sites that work off subdomains eg. tm.powersite.co.nz people will type www.tm.powersite.co.nz
I've written an article about this subject here:
http://bla.st/site/blog/67/
dear god. is there anyone who would NOT recognise dmiessler.com as a website?
>It makes mentioning that it is a website unnecessary.
when you see 012 3456 7890 would you need it explained that it's a telephone number?
other than that: interesting discussion. a pointless storm in a teacup of course but diverting nonetheless.
for the uber-geeks amongst you the www might matter as a matter of intellectual consistency. i hate to explain you're fighting a loosing battle outside the matrix (the english language anyone? hell, in the states you folks even stick w/feet & inches!) but if it makes more sense when you're talking geek-speak, go for it. the fact remains though that in general audience publishing, advertising, etc, it is ugly, useless, wastes space and is, for anyone who has actually used a browser for more than 15 minutes, patronising. i edited a (fairly insignificant) magazine once and we dropped it. now, loads of ppl do, and one day everyone (outside of specialist tech publications) will... that being the case, how much better off would we be if everyone who stuck a no-www link on their page put a link to an anti-poverty site? just a thought.
I had to make a special request for the hostmaster at universtiy of michigan to correct their dns zone files for the school where i work. you can't just drop the www and expect it to work. you will find some sites still don't have that set properly.
i agree though, what a waste of time. i just say "dub dub dub" or something.
you shouldnt be using that thing anyway. i block all images from them.
web.yahoo.com
Actually, same goes for my own personal site.
> specific host. The idea here is for example.com to point to 1.1.1.1 just the same as www.example.com
> does now.
>
>This is not a major shift; it’s simply a call to shed some legacy baggage.
not all DNS records point to a specific host, I think you meant to say 'all DNS "A" records point to a specific host'. The existence of a domain does not require there to be an A record for the bare domain name (or any A records at all, in fact). Adding an A record for 'domain' would be adding unnecessary baggage if a 'www' A record existed for serving web content. In addition most MTAs use a domain 'A' record as a fallback if an 'MX' record is not found for a domain. This use of domainname A records would break under 'no-www'.
ctl-shift-enter .org
shift-enter for .net
I've only tested this in Firefox.
Some other things I hate about the differences between www. and no-www:
1. cookies set for www.example.com are not necessarily available to example.com, or vice versa. mileage varies depending on browser. i hate that.
2. when you purchase a SSL cert for your domain name, you either have to purchase one only for a completely different domain (which is what I usually do), like secure.mydomain.com, or you have to purchase one for mydomain.com AND www.mydomain.com. Some SSL providers are not providing wildcard certs, where you could use one cert for both cases, but it costs a lot more for that kind of functionality. again, i hate that.
If you set the domain "foo.bar" on a cookie, it won't be sent (by a compliant browser anyway) when accessing http://foo.bar/ due to the way the RFC is worded, but it would be sent to http://www.foo.bar/. Again, this only matters if you have multiple web hostnames, but many sites do. (Like static.foo.bar, beta.foo.bar, test.foo.bar, forums.foo.bar and so-on).
Cookies without domains are only sent back to the web server that set them, which means a cookie set from http://foo.bar/ could never be sent to any other hostname either.
None of this matters if you don't set cookies, of course.
Personally, I like to call most of my web hosts "web".
for
blogspamming
digg!
Your
concise
and
informative
article
was
a
refreshing
change
from
the
usual
drivel.
It
is
unfortunate
however
that
most
people
here
have
no
grasp
of
the
URL
concept
is
a
joke.
browsers
already
do
this.
just
press
Control
as
you
hit
Enter.
...omg
you
are
all
such
sheeples!
Congratulations, generic users finally understand a geek behaviour (from the early nineties).
www. might be a little old school for some, but oh well ;-)
web.org.uk
Steve
If you have multiple sub-sites within your domain, fine - have forum.example.com, www.example.com, whatever.example.com, but don't leave example.com broken!
if the dommain.com is not found then try .co.uk .net .org etc
in summary
drop the www
drop the http://
drop the .com
eg: http://www.meninweb.blogspot.com
You can drop www and http://
meninweb.blogspot.com will do the job but if it is meninweb.blogspot where it will go com or net or org or etc ??
meninweb.blogspot.com
Just look my above post. if I put
http://www.meninweb.blogspot.com or
http://meninweb.blogspot.com will create a link automatically in the post
meninweb.blogspot.com will not create a link.
I will agree only with www can take out, but some where some issues will arise in the programming world, that is sure
For some reason though, maybe out of habit, I still type the full http://www.mywebsite.com when coding and making links.
www.domain.com
ftp.domain.com
jabber.domain.com
irc.domain.com
smtp.domain.com
imap.domain.com
...
You could use 'domain.com' in all cases... if all services are under the same IP.
If you have, say, 'smtp.domain.com' then you can change the SMTP server IP if you need to
and no one will notice it.
However if everybody is using 'domain.com' for everything then you'll have a problem if you
want any of these services to be in another host.
The internet is more than the world wide web.
If you really hate the 3 w's, just keep one w.
http://w.dmiessler.com
Gives you the benefit of distinguishing your www stuff from your ftp stuff; and if the two extra characters bug you that much, you save 2/3 of them.
Annoying to no end.
Drives you crazy, doesn't it?
Try http://mms.t-mobile.de and then http://www.mms.t-mobile.de. See any difference ?
Sorry about that.
@Bear
It doesn't shoot down the idea. As I said in the piece, the concept isn't to abolish hostnames -- only to point the root of the domain to the main web content. And by the way, you can just do the same with your setup as well. Send the external DNS queries to your internal DNS server, and point the root to the IP address of your web content. This isn't a discussion of eliminating options -- just changing default behavior.
But the purpose is not to say what's best for everyone, but rather what's best for the Internet and its users in general.
However, it is best to careful when switching from a "www" domain to a non-www domain name, as it may temporarily result in a loss of traffic and page indexing on search engine. It has to be done with extra care. You definitely will not want to result in loss of traffic.
An interesting topic of discussion here. I agree with "PC Pete" in the fact that using the "www" in print makes it clear that a website is being referenced. The thing that still amazes me is that most people still type a web address into a search bar instead of a the browsers address bar!
www.mysite.com
wiki.mysite.com
forum.mysite.com
They all use the same protocol, HTTP, so there would still need to be some other distinction to identify which machine any particular request is actually referring to.
In this case, I suppose the bare string "mysite.com" could be treated as a synonym for one of the three depending on their relative popularity, and traffic could be rerouted accordingly. But the other two servers would have to retain their individual unique names.