It’s Time to Drop the “www”
By Daniel Miessler on July 24th, 2007: Tagged as Culture | Geek | Internet | Protocols | Standards
It’s no longer necessary to use “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. Enter no-www.
The reason for using the “www” hostname prefix when entering websites is now a matter of history. It’s old. Deprecated. Outdated. 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. It’s wasteful to type, and it’s cumbersome to pronounce. Consider that it takes nine syllables to properly enunciate three characters.
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
Some argue that there is still a good reason to separate traffic destined to web servers from that destined to the domain itself. I think this is precisely the idea that’s become obsolete. The reason for that differentiation in the past was that the other protocols were as prolific (or even more prolific) than HTTP at the time. HTTP was just one of many options, so it made no sense to give any type of traffic a preference by pointing the root of a given domain to the system that hosted that content.
Things are different now. HTTP is utterly dominant. Sites interacting with the public on any serious scale does so via a web server, so making this the default is a matter of obvious practicality. 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 point to the web content as a matter of convention.As for people who include it when speaking, there’s no need to be rude when correcting them. Just kindly inform them that it’s faster if they just go to the domain itself, and that the “www” isn’t needed.
For more information, check out the no-www FAQ, and feel free to fly their sitecon seen above.:
[Edited 07.27.07]
Oh, and typing “http://” is superfluous as well. Modern browsers add it for you. (edited for grammar)
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 7/24/2007 @ 3:55 pm
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.
Comment by Dave — 7/24/2007 @ 7:20 pm
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 http://www.example.com will resolve to - it’ll be the webserver(s) for the domain, whereas http://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….
Comment by David Precious — 7/25/2007 @ 1:56 am
to David Precious:
The point is that it’s intuitive without the superfluous http://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.
Comment by Tim F. — 7/25/2007 @ 8:15 am
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.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 7/25/2007 @ 8:52 am
“matter of history. It’s old. Deprecated. Outdated. Antiquated.” or simply missunderstood by the no-www guys? how about this example: http://www.mygreatcompany.com forum.mygreatcompany.com irc.mygreatcompany.com http://ftp.mygreatcompany.com
the http://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 http://www. version. but providing no http://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 :)
Comment by fdemmer — 7/25/2007 @ 10:00 am
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.
Comment by sp — 7/25/2007 @ 10:26 am
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.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 7/25/2007 @ 10:26 am
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.”
Comment by Brian Faust — 7/25/2007 @ 10:49 am
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.
Comment by bob-o — 7/25/2007 @ 10:53 am
http://www.dmiessler.com
Comment by Andrew — 7/25/2007 @ 10:59 am
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!
Comment by PC Pete — 7/25/2007 @ 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.
It makes mentioning that it is a website unnecessary.
Comment by Bart — 7/25/2007 @ 11:03 am
@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.
Comment by justin — 7/25/2007 @ 11:05 am
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.
Comment by Bill Sempf — 7/25/2007 @ 11:21 am
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 ;)
Comment by Michael — 7/25/2007 @ 11:22 am
“providing no http://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.)
Comment by Dan — 7/25/2007 @ 11:30 am
I heard someone pronounce “www” as “dub dub dub”
Comment by Olivier — 7/25/2007 @ 11:31 am
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://”
Comment by Casey — 7/25/2007 @ 11:36 am
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.
Comment by Mike — 7/25/2007 @ 11:39 am
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?
Comment by Sasha — 7/25/2007 @ 11:47 am
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.
Comment by Kyle — 7/25/2007 @ 11:54 am
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
Comment by mike — 7/25/2007 @ 12:03 pm
Problem is that some servers are still set to where you can only pull up the domain if you put in the http://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.
Comment by jive — 7/25/2007 @ 12:13 pm
@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 http://www.example.com does now.
This is not a major shift; it’s simply a call to shed some legacy baggage.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 7/25/2007 @ 12:19 pm
Its Time to Drop the www…
This story has been submitted to Stirrdup. Your support can help it become hot….
Trackback by Stirrdup Trackback — 7/25/2007 @ 12:29 pm
wwwhat is wwwrong wwwith www?
Comment by cornfused — 7/25/2007 @ 12:29 pm
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.
Comment by Juno — 7/25/2007 @ 12:55 pm
This is bullshit! www = world wide web . I can use the domain name for other purposes hence the non-www form. Take http://www.nasa.gov for example. They will never use http://nasa.gov for world wide web display.
Comment by pufone — 7/25/2007 @ 12:57 pm
What about http://www.com?
Yahoo pioneered the widespread use of subdomains with its “finance.yahoo.com” and so forth. The Web’s been easier to use since. Why other companies don’t do what Yahoo does is beyond me.
What would you rather type, yahoo.com/finance or finance.yahoo.com?
The argument that “WWW” serves a purpose for DNS and URL and others is quite obviously quashed by the domain http://www.com. How do you explain that? Oh, it’s the root? What does that mean? Tell that to your neighbor.
Comment by Brad — 7/25/2007 @ 12:57 pm
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…
Comment by Mike — 7/25/2007 @ 1:18 pm
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.
Comment by Christefano — 7/25/2007 @ 1:18 pm
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.
Comment by Raju — 7/25/2007 @ 1:24 pm
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.
Comment by Chaz — 7/25/2007 @ 1:24 pm
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.
Comment by Mirage — 7/25/2007 @ 1:38 pm
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.
Comment by Mark Baker — 7/25/2007 @ 1:48 pm
Everyone needs to reread what “Mike” wrote: —-= 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. —-= Noone’s disagreeing that the vast majority of times someone enters http://example.com into their browser that they mean http://www.example.com.
Informally encouraging websites to redirect no subdomain to www is perfectly fine. However, trying to enforce that and change the standard is something else entirely. The latter is not just “shedding legacy baggage”, it’s throwing out flexiblity to set in stone what is currently the most popular trend. THAT is what turns into legacy baggage.
Comment by Matt — 7/25/2007 @ 1:49 pm
Um… it’s not deprecated. Subdomains? Also - what would FTP sites do, and what would differentiate a www page from something else?
Comment by Jason — 7/25/2007 @ 1:59 pm
click in address bar type “cnn” or “yahoo” or “whatever” +
Comment by skipper coogan — 7/25/2007 @ 2:19 pm
I think www is still useful, for example in google you can look for pages in http://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 http://www.example.com, media.example.com and so on you can speed up your site.
Comment by Julian — 7/25/2007 @ 2:42 pm
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.
Comment by Eric — 7/25/2007 @ 2:56 pm
WWW indicates a world wide web site. You can also have http://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.
Comment by Connor — 7/25/2007 @ 3:03 pm
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
Comment by Ernie Oporto — 7/25/2007 @ 3:31 pm
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.
Comment by Samuel Tardieu — 7/25/2007 @ 4:06 pm
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: http://www.bla.st
Unfortunately I’ve found people will still type http://www.bla.st.com which just doens’t work. I’ve also found if I tell people “Go to bla.st” they type http://www.bla.st. Even sites that work off subdomains eg. tm.powersite.co.nz people will type http://www.tm.powersite.co.nz
I’ve written an article about this subject here: http://bla.st/site/blog/67/
Comment by Tim — 7/25/2007 @ 4:17 pm
I thought www stood for waa waa wee woo.
Comment by mooslim — 7/25/2007 @ 4:17 pm
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”?
Comment by Lee Coursey — 7/25/2007 @ 4:19 pm
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Pingback by Some Dude’s Rant on Dropping www — 7/25/2007 @ 4:22 pm
All for this one it is such a waste of time!
Comment by Web Design Chester — 7/25/2007 @ 4:57 pm
Although I support no-www, and my own web site qualifies as a “class B” site, I recently discovered a good reason for some sites to remain using the www prefix (or some other nonempty prefix).
Some configurations of site accelerators such as Akamai require you to set up a CNAME alias from your site name to something run by Akamai. For example, http://www.yahoo.com is an alias for an Akamai host:
$ host http://www.yahoo.com http://www.yahoo.com is a nickname for http://www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net http://www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net has address 209.191.93.52
Because the DNS specification states that a node that uses a CNAME should not have any other RRs, this means that one cannot legally use a CNAME at their www-less domain name, because that domain name must have an SOA record there. Therefore, to be able to obtain the full benefit of services like Akamai, a large site must retain the www prefix.
As for diluting your search results, you should always permanently redirect similar names (ie. www and www-less versions) to the same canonical version of your name, whichever you choose. Search engines like Google will prefer this consolidation, rather than having two different names that return the same content.
Comment by Greg Hewgill — 7/25/2007 @ 5:48 pm
>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.
Comment by sim — 7/25/2007 @ 6:23 pm
if the server doesn’t have the proper dns configuation it may or may not work without the http://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.
Comment by qbit — 7/25/2007 @ 7:12 pm
oh dude… akamai is a piece of c4ap. you shouldnt be using that thing anyway. i block all images from them.
Comment by qbit — 7/25/2007 @ 7:13 pm
This is stupid. You should redirect non-www to http://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.
Comment by Rob — 7/25/2007 @ 7:44 pm
I have always advocated for the word ‘web’ in place of http://www. Easier to say and more descriptive to boot.
web.yahoo.com
Comment by jason — 7/25/2007 @ 9:46 pm
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?
Comment by Dennis — 7/25/2007 @ 9:53 pm
@53, try typing in http://www.slashdot.org/ and you will get redirected to http://slashdot.org/
Actually, same goes for my own personal site.
Comment by Peter Cruickshank — 7/25/2007 @ 10:01 pm
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.
Comment by David — 7/25/2007 @ 10:16 pm
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.
Comment by Me — 7/25/2007 @ 10:24 pm
but we should force the USA websites to add .us
Comment by nri — 7/25/2007 @ 10:38 pm
[...] agree with this argument more. Not only is it cumbersome to say (which I hope most of you aren’t anymore), it’s [...]
Pingback by Situated Giblets » I second the motion! — 7/25/2007 @ 10:39 pm
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.
Comment by Jesse — 7/25/2007 @ 10:43 pm
dub dub dub….
Comment by Jaswah — 7/25/2007 @ 10:43 pm
dub dub dub…
Comment by Jaswah — 7/25/2007 @ 10:44 pm
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.
Comment by Jss — 7/25/2007 @ 10:46 pm
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.
Comment by Emily — 7/25/2007 @ 10:50 pm
If they want to use it let them :P I personally haven’t said http://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.
Comment by Adam — 7/25/2007 @ 11:10 pm
> 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 http://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’.
Comment by james — 7/25/2007 @ 11:15 pm
I don’t think it’s necessary to forgo the http://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.
Comment by BLOGMYWAY.org — 7/25/2007 @ 11:24 pm
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
Comment by Mrvandemar — 7/25/2007 @ 11:31 pm
If you type a domain name in the location bar, for instance, ebay, and hit control-enter, it adds the http://www. and .com for you.
ctl-shift-enter .org shift-enter for .net
I’ve only tested this in Firefox.
Comment by kuhsay — 7/25/2007 @ 11:39 pm
ctrl-enter works for IE and FF
Comment by Eddie — 7/25/2007 @ 11:58 pm
[...] favorite comment from this page.. I heard someone pronounce “www” as “dub dub [...]
Pingback by No WWW Initiative at TH·E CON·CEP’TU·AL·IST — 7/25/2007 @ 11:58 pm
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 http://www.blog.mysite.com instead of just blog.mysite.com.
Some other things I hate about the differences between http://www. and no-www:
cookies set for http://www.example.com are not necessarily available to example.com, or vice versa. mileage varies depending on browser. i hate that.
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 http://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.
Comment by Shade — 7/26/2007 @ 12:06 am
Oh yeah, and funny that even this site ONLY highlights/auto-hyperlinks domains that begin with http://www.example.com and not other subdomains, like blog.example.com, or just example.com. :)
Comment by Shade — 7/26/2007 @ 12:12 am
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”.
Comment by Nick Johnson — 7/26/2007 @ 12:13 am
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
Comment by Shade — 7/26/2007 @ 12:15 am
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.
Comment by Shade — 7/26/2007 @ 12:17 am
I remember back in the day you had to type “Http://www.” and capitals mattered. or so we were told.
Comment by Snowy — 7/26/2007 @ 12:20 am
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
Comment by Mega Uber Tron — 7/26/2007 @ 12:25 am
this is a joke.
browsers already do this.
just press Control as you hit Enter.
…omg you are all such sheeples!
Comment by Brien — 7/26/2007 @ 12:44 am
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).
Comment by Sinesurfer — 7/26/2007 @ 12:50 am
not all the websites work without www!
Comment by yessuz — 7/26/2007 @ 1:57 am
domain.com will resolve to the default A record for the domain, however, this may be a different address to what http://www.domain.com will resolve to. Typically, they are the same but not always.
http://www. might be a little old school for some, but oh well ;-)
Comment by chris — 7/26/2007 @ 1:59 am
I never understood why www was used to begin with. It would have made so much more sense to use “web” instead. One syllable.
Comment by ken — 7/26/2007 @ 2:39 am
You’re well behind the curve on this one fellah…..
web.org.uk
Comment by Dave — 7/26/2007 @ 3:00 am
Keep up at the back :-)
Comment by Simon — 7/26/2007 @ 3:15 am
Wrong. www is required, there are other services available through a browser, www is just one of the standard web server ones.
Comment by Gaz — 7/26/2007 @ 3:17 am
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
Comment by Assassin's Creed — 7/26/2007 @ 3:43 am
The web is only one part of the internet. If you’re too dumb to use it go play with sticks or something
Comment by Gaz — 7/26/2007 @ 3:55 am
[...] ¡Acabemos con el "www"! [ENG]dmiessler.com/standards/its-time-to-drop-the-www por hans_madrid hace pocos segundos [...]
Pingback by ¡Acabemos con el "www"! [ENG] // menéame — 7/26/2007 @ 4:15 am
TCP/IP ports are for distinguishing different services from each other and user doesn’t even have to know about it.
If you have multiple sub-sites within your domain, fine - have forum.example.com, http://www.example.com, whatever.example.com, but don’t leave example.com broken!
Comment by kL — 7/26/2007 @ 4:28 am
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
Comment by memals — 7/26/2007 @ 4:30 am
Will browsers/email programs etc be able to identify URL’s and convert them into hotlinks if you drop the www ?
Comment by Tonym — 7/26/2007 @ 4:52 am
memals, I agree with the first two. but not the last.
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
Comment by meninwbe — 7/26/2007 @ 4:54 am
Also in the programming world it will make a lot of impact if we remove this
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
Comment by meninwbe — 7/26/2007 @ 4:57 am
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’.
Comment by Paul — 7/26/2007 @ 5:00 am
no www for me!
Comment by veewpe — 7/26/2007 @ 5:08 am
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 http://www.example.com.
Comment by aaaaaaa — 7/26/2007 @ 5:37 am
good article!!
Comment by Shashank Garg — 7/26/2007 @ 5:56 am
lets reduce typing to domain name?
Comment by freemarketresearch.co.uk — 7/26/2007 @ 6:02 am
I never type “http://” or “www.”, except for one site where it won’t work without “www.”
Comment by Kotjze — 7/26/2007 @ 6:17 am
With Mozilla, you don’t even have to type a “.com.”
Comment by me — 7/26/2007 @ 6:48 am
Oh come on people. NOBODY CARES
Comment by Cifra -wwwSnob — 7/26/2007 @ 6:50 am
How about typing in the name of webste only like : yahoo and press ctrl+enter browsers add all the required stuff themselves [:P]
Comment by Arslan — 7/26/2007 @ 6:50 am
[...] interesting reading - It’s Time to Drop the “www”, especially read the comments, it really throws some arguments for and against the no-www movement [...]
Pingback by No to WWW « Sanity, Insanity, and Moi — 7/26/2007 @ 6:58 am
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.
Comment by Levi Blackman — 7/26/2007 @ 7:10 am
this is RETARDED, why not just use numbers, since they are faster to type in?
Comment by RETARDED — 7/26/2007 @ 7:35 am
Well, using the same reasoning you don’t need any of these:
http://www.domain.com http://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.
Comment by Berto — 7/26/2007 @ 7:36 am
Unless your company’s only service is HTTP to access a web site, keep the http://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.
Comment by KMXZ — 7/26/2007 @ 7:53 am
ccny.cuny.edu does not work unless you type in http://www.ccny.cuny.edu. Ridiculous…
Comment by Ivan — 7/26/2007 @ 8:17 am
To add to that, your blog’s comment script does not convert ccny.cuny.edu to a link automatically, but it does so for http://www.ccny.cuny.edu. How would a script recognize that I am typing in a web address unless I typed in http:// or www?
Comment by Ivan — 7/26/2007 @ 8:18 am
This is exactly why most people should keep their opinions to themselves
Comment by Jesus — 7/26/2007 @ 8:32 am
They should build a website called use friggin .htaccess! mod_rewrite for ever
Comment by Cifra -wwwSnob — 7/26/2007 @ 8:48 am
[...] I posted recently about why we should no longer need to enter “www” when visiting websites in a browser. The topic is evidently an emotional one as I’ve received a ton of feedback on the matter. For those that missed it, here’s the basic argument: The reason for using the “www” hostname prefix when entering websites is now a matter of history. It’s old. Deprecated. Outdated. 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. It’s wasteful to type, and it’s cumbersome to pronounce. Consider that it takes nine syllables to properly enunciate three characters. [...]
Pingback by Eliminating "www" [Part 2] | dmiessler.com — 7/26/2007 @ 9:58 am
I agree with this movement
Comment by Jerry Seinfeld — 7/26/2007 @ 11:02 am
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.
Comment by Lunacite — 7/26/2007 @ 11:49 am
[...] Dmiessler Articulo escrito el 26 de Julio de 2007 por luki y publicado en Sitios Web, Internet. Permalink - [...]
Pingback by Decir adiós al www. — 7/26/2007 @ 2:00 pm
[...] read more | digg story [...]
Pingback by It’s Time to Drop the “www” « digg the wordz — 7/26/2007 @ 4:36 pm
http://www.dmiessler.com/
Drives you crazy, doesn’t it?
Comment by Eric — 7/26/2007 @ 6:00 pm
www … its just a bit harder to say … not hard to write or type … so its Ok for me … i seldom tell people my address aloud … i text it … email it … or IM it … no trouble at all …
Comment by subcorpus — 7/26/2007 @ 6:24 pm
[...] read more | digg story [...]
Pingback by jefflundberg.com/blog » Blog Archive » It’s Time to Drop the “www” — 7/26/2007 @ 7:32 pm
who types www? nobody. just type the name of the domain eg. hotmail, then hit ctrl enter. it does the www and .com for you.
Comment by thomas anderson — 7/26/2007 @ 8:49 pm
[...] Dig from:Here [...]
Pingback by It’s Time to Drop the “www” | Dig Union — 7/26/2007 @ 8:51 pm
[...] kurie tinklaraščių autoriai agituoja atsisakyti „www“ priešdėlio interneto adresuose. Taip juos paprasčiau ir lengviau būtų įsiminti, pasakyti balsu (kaip sakote – vėvėvė ar [...]
Pingback by nežinau.lt — 7/27/2007 @ 8:31 am
Ahh but there’s a bit of a problem with this … what happens when the site that people really need to go to is say, http://test.example.com … well of course people type in http://www.test.example.com and tell you that the URL you have given them doesn’t work. I routinely add http://www. in front of all my third level domains that need public access to prevent many such emails like “You’re site doesn’t work”
While I agree with this in theory it’s going to be an uphill battle. It’s like people saying Kleenex instead of tissue … it wasn’t nipped in the bud early enough. You’d be amazed (or maybe not) at how many people think that a site address is not correct if it doesn’t have http://www. in front of it and that’s going to be a tough one to get out there.
Lastly if you have your www third level domain pointing at your main top level domain, what’s the point of this excercise? To save the unwashed masses from having to type http://www. ? Anyone who cares about SEO at all will have both addresses land at the same place with mod_rewrite or something similar, so again, what’s the point of this .. considering that more often than ot people will redirect blah.com to http://www.blah.com … which completely undoes this whole movement.
Comment by Mark Guertin — 7/27/2007 @ 1:34 pm
It is not true that www is totally useless. Here is an exemple: Try http://mms.t-mobile.de and then http://www.mms.t-mobile.de. See any difference ?
Comment by elend — 7/28/2007 @ 5:09 am
[...] of the http://www.. If you spend just a few minutes a day browsing, you hardly type these anymore. Some wrote about it, and even started a movement. So we came from http://www.apple.com to apple.com. Now, [...]
Pingback by raaaaaaaa! » Blog Archive » One TLD to rule them all… — 7/28/2007 @ 10:37 am
[...] read more · digg story [...]
Pingback by jefflundberg.com/blog » Blog Archive » It’s Time to Drop the “www” — 7/28/2007 @ 2:44 pm
[...] site on my part when I registered the domains, but they all redirect to http://www. There is a move to drop the www on all websites because it is seen as supercilious, not to mention it takes nine slabs to pronounce [...]
Pingback by delightfully dorky… » Blog Archive » Drop It — 7/28/2007 @ 8:57 pm
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) http://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 http://www. will resolve to my public address - reachable from the outside world. I think this shoots down the idea that the http://www. prefix serves no purpose and isn’t needed.
Comment by Bear — 7/29/2007 @ 3:31 pm
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 http://www. should have been http://www.mydomain. Sorry about that.
Comment by Bear — 7/29/2007 @ 3:36 pm
@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.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 7/29/2007 @ 3:43 pm
[...] Miessler recently posted that we need to lose the www [...]
Pingback by Phill Price » Blog Archive » Why we need www — 7/31/2007 @ 3:40 pm
[...] of you who’ve recently subscribed to my feed have likely come either for my no-www article or my piece about the nice guy paradox. I’m glad you enjoyed those, and welcome to the [...]
Pingback by Greetings New Subscribers | dmiessler.com — 8/1/2007 @ 9:56 am
[...] read more | digg story [...]
Pingback by It’s Time to Drop the “www” « fugit irreparabile tempus — 8/5/2007 @ 9:11 pm
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.
Comment by Keith — 8/7/2007 @ 5:04 am
I recommend using uuuuuu instead of http://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?
Comment by Chuck — 8/7/2007 @ 10:09 am
[...] eso apoyo la iniciativa de eliminar las www de la direcciones web y coincido con Douglas [...]
Pingback by La pronunciación de WWW — 8/7/2007 @ 11:59 pm
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?
Comment by Dean — 8/20/2007 @ 11:15 pm
[...] did this a while back, but I thought I would mention it now: I have dropped the www from ShiftEleven. This came about from a discussion I had with Jason. He proposed the important [...]
Pingback by Dropping the WWW - ShiftEleven — 1/12/2008 @ 5:01 pm