No More “www”
By Daniel Miessler on November 26th, 2007: Tagged as Internet
It’s time to stop using “www” when referring to websites. It’s a waste of storage, a waste of ink, and it takes 2-5 times as long to pronounce as saying the domain by itself. Think about it: nine syllables to properly enunciate three characters. Enter no-www.
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 reason behind it is to standardize domain names providing web content and to avoid typing unnecessary letters. — Wikipedia
The reason for using the “www” hostname prefix when entering websites is now a matter of history. It’s old, deprecated, outdated, and antiquated. Like websites that only work in Internet Explorer, sites that break when you use the domain alone should be firmly encouraged to join the 21st century.
Some argue that there is still a good reason to separate traffic destined to web servers from that destined to the domain itself. This is precisely the idea that’s become obsolete. The reason for that separation in the past was that HTTP (web traffic) used to be just one of many services that one could use for a given domain.
In other words, web traffic wasn’t particularly special so it didn’t make any sense to point it (or any other service) to the root of the domain by default.
Things are different now. Web traffic now dominates Internet use when it comes to user interaction. If someone is manually entering an address to reach a public site, the odds are very high that they’re visiting an organization’s web site rather than some other type of service. As such, directing users to an organization’s web content by default is a matter of obvious practicality. Adding the “www” has simply become superfluous.
This doesn’t mean we should abolish the use of hostnames. Hostnames are excellent tools for separating traffic and making meaningful associations with users. The argument here is simply for having the root of the domain point to the web content as a matter of convention.
So the next time you hear someone stumbling over “double-u, double-u, double-u”, just kindly inform them that it’s faster if they just go to the domain itself, and that for the majority of major sites the “www” isn’t needed anymore.:
