No WWW? Not!

Some misguided folks feel that the "www" that goes in front of most web sites is redundant, and should be done away with.

These "No WWW" folks are wrong. Many, many people, are convinced that the "www" is required, so that if you tell them to go mywebsite.com, they assume you mean "www.mywebsite.com". Companies that don't make the "www" version work are missing the boat.

But they don't insist you make the "www.domain.com" fail. What they do advocate is changing the URL from "www.domain.com" to "domain.com" when you use the "www" version. Why not just leave it the way it was? It's a subtler version of a "Your browser sucks" message. It's just plain rude.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 (Link)

Comments

Posted by Kinmare Saturday, November 29, 2003 at 11:06 AM

Boy, something with my system here at work does not like the site you are linking to. When I go there in IE6, my system crashes & reboots. I am able to get there using Mozilla.

Posted by Monte Mitzelfelt Monday, December 1, 2003 at 10:04 PM

There "email doesn't use mail. or smtp., why should http use www." Completely ignoring the fact that DNS authors to add a DNS query specificly for EMAIL! Rather than overburden the DNS protocol with a new lookup for each new protocol, they developed the convention of pointing a protocol.domain.com at a server that served that protocol on the standard port number for that protocol. For instance: ftp.domain.com, irc.domain.com, gopher.domain.com, etc. Another protcol was designed to ask a host what port a certain RPC service was offered on, RPC Port Mapper.

Posted by Beth Thursday, December 4, 2003 at 01:43 PM

I'm missing something...is it really that rude to transparently drop the www. when serving up content? We don't do it (yet) and aren't really considering it, but it seems to me to be fairly transparent to the end user...not at all like those "your browsers suck so we won't serve you the content you want" messages.

Posted by Anthony Mills Tuesday, December 16, 2003 at 09:00 AM

Can we get an RSS feed, please?

Posted by Chad Lundgren Tuesday, December 16, 2003 at 12:03 PM

Like pretty much all Movable Type Blogs, there are several automatically generated RSS feeds. Even though a lot of RSS syndicator programs will autodiscover, I can't argue that I shouldn't have actual links. So I've added links to RSS 1 and 2 feeds to the sidebar on pretty much every page.

Posted by Anthony Mills Tuesday, December 16, 2003 at 03:14 PM

Thanks, Chad!

RSS aggregators are definitely the way to keep up on blogs.

Now, back to your regularly-scheduled comments ...

Posted by John Scott Wednesday, December 17, 2003 at 09:18 PM

>Some misguided folks feel that the "www" that >goes in front of most web sites is redundant, >and should be done away with.

Wow. Good stuff there. This is really a simple issue - if somebody they don't like the "www" they don't need to include it when they type addresses in the browser's address bar. Maybe they could take tyhe energy used to fight "www" and apply it toward ending third world hunger.