Way back when things got started, it was the best year the letter “w” had since World Wars were invented. Everyone from school children to radio and television announcers had trouble enunciating “www” as it quickly became mainstream.
It took web developers about 20 minutes to realize it was stupid and they didn’t need “www” in the first place. Many developers have stopped using the “www” but still more sites are slapped up everyday with the worthless letters that are difficult to pronounce, redundant and a waste of time to type.
It kills me when I tell someone to go to a particular site and they start typing “www”. Please stop it, both of you - users and developers.
My biggest complaint about websites that still have “www” in their name is that most of the poor businesses associated with the website have no idea what’s going on and turn around and advertise the site with “www” in front of the business name. Every time I see a business advertise “www.{business-name}.com”, I think “waste and technical ignorance” instead of whatever they want me to think about their business.
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Just type the companyname and press Ctrl-Enter…
Doug on July 12th, 2007 at 7:03 pm | Link
My problem is when I have gotten into the habit of typing a website address like: websiteaddress.com or whatever the extension. But, after hitting enter, it goes to Page Cannot Be Found and I am like, okay that’s the correct address. Only to realize, I have to type www.websiteaddress.com, which I think defeats the whole purpose. I mean come on, I don’t have time for that. You are telling me that if I didn’t get pissed enough to actually go back and type www, I would have possibly not even been able to view the information your site was promising to provide. I believe that throws people off nowadays.
I too hate when people are telling you their website address, and go www, it’s like omg, you don’t need to do that, or maybe they do? lol. Sad though.
Finally, must agree when people ask what site is that, and they sit down and I am telling them websiteaddress.com and they’re going okay so it’s www dot….urgh madness!
sean on July 12th, 2007 at 7:25 pm | Link
I havent dived in to web technologies in quite some time but Ill try to inject some rationalization here.
IIRC, the “www” means (or at one time used to mean) your website had been registered with IANA, where as domain.com depended on local DNS cache information. Possibly why some browsers prepend www to your domains in the title bar, also why they probably add .com, .org, .net, TLD’s to the end of a domain if you dont. Example, type in wikipedia in the address bar and some browsers will try that name under several TLD’s.
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Meh, anyway I could be wrong so here is what wikipedia says:
WWW prefix in Web addresses
“www” is commonly found at the beginning of Web addresses because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. So for example, the host name for a Web server is often “www”; for an FTP server, “ftp”; and for a USENET news server, “news” or “nntp” (after the news protocol NNTP). These host names appear as DNS subdomain names, as in “www.example.com”.
This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; indeed, the first Web server was at “nxoc01.cern.ch”[14] and even today many Web sites exist without a “www” prefix. The “www” prefix has no meaning in the way the main website is shown. The “www” prefix is simply one choice for a Web site’s subdomain name.
Some Web browsers will automatically try adding “www.” to the beginning, and possibly “.com” to the end, of typed URLs if no host is found without them. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera will also prefix “http://www.” and append “.com” to the address bar contents if the Control and Enter keys are pressed simultaneously. For example, entering “example” in the address bar and then pressing either just Enter or Control+Enter will usually resolve to “http://www.example.com”, depending on the exact browser version and its settings.
notquiteleet on August 10th, 2007 at 6:35 am | Link