Pop quiz, hotshot. Which one is the superior Uniform Resource Locator?
or
This is one of those intractable problems. Global wars have been fought over so much less. In hacker circles, this is sometimes referred to as a bikeshed discussion.
I’m always amazed when emnot/em typing in www. manages to break things; my university’s public website somehow redirects to the SSL port and breaks if you don’t type WWW, which I’ve pointed out, though I continue to be ignored.
Practice tends to favor the simple: how many people actually enforce www.domain.tld as canonical anymore?
@Heliologue agreed - it’s ridiculous that some very popular sites still break if you don’t explicitly request www.example.com. It’s 2 or 3 lines in your .htaccess file! Come on!
Heh, I remember that episode. One of my favorite shows - good post 
The worst part is that saying “double u double u double u” takes 9 syllables while saying “world wide web” takes 3. How many acronyms are three times longer than what they stand for?
And there was me thinking all the hip cats said “triple-w dot”.
I’ve heard “hippity-tippity dub-dub-dub” said for http://www.
I think the person said it jokingly.
Nice, you showed me a funny cartoon series I din’t know about… know I’m gonna have to waste hours.
http:// is a crucial part of the URI simply because it designates it as a URI!
What should example.com mean? http://example.com or ./example.com?
I’ve always liked having the “www” at the beginning of URL’s, but as you said when sub-domains come into it I leave them out. What really annoys me though is when people add “www” to the beginning of a subdomain (e.g. http://www.blog.globodex.com. For me leave the prefix with a normal URL and keep it off when using sub-domains.
It’s important to get your canonical links down, but oddly you can do everything wrong with your URL (having a “real” domain and a Typepad domain, accepting both www and sans www, having unfriendly URLs) yet be a very succesful blogger (see many popular Typepad bloggers like Seth Godin and VC Fred Wilson).
Good writing and good engagement with readers can overcome almost any bonehead technical move. Course, if your content is great AND you do the blog tech stuff right, you’re golden.
funny…
www.somecompanyname.tld was our production website,
but vwvw.somecompanyname.tld was our qa sandbox while showing our products on QVC.
with the proper font, it’s hard to tell 
If only it was their ABC Saturday morning show, Squigglevision: “www, learn it, use it, wear it out.”
Personally I prefer the no-www approach - www is so 90s. But of course the www subdomain should always be supported using a permanent redirect.
The only technical issue I’ve come across with no-www is segmenting cookies by subdomain. If you set your cookies against .example.org, you can’t have cookie-free subdomains like static.example.org. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong - perhaps not specifying a cookie domain at all while serving cookies from example.org does not include subdomains, but specifying a cookie domain of example.org implies .example.org which includes all subdomains.
There’s a whole lot more discussion on the www debate matter here:
I’m I the only person that no longer types the url in the adress bar? 90% of the websites I visit are bookmarked, the other 10% I just google it. Using a quick search shortcut (like “g coding horror” for google “coding horror”, or a quicksearch bar) is faster and less error prone than typing the url itself. URLs are obsolete, in these days an URL is just a little more meaningful than an IP adress.
It’s much easier for us Germans, as we pronounce W pretty much like you pronounce V (slightly different vowel). So it’s “Weh-Weh-Weh”.
I wonder what Coach McGirk would have to say on this issue…
Home Movies was comedic genius. Sadly, I think a lot of us HAVE had discussions like the one in that episode, too. heh.
I’ve become so trained to alt+d rootword ctrl+enter for going to sites by name that not having a www.rootword.com would seriously slow me down. Thankfully all of the big browsers have this exact shortcut.
Hmm… I agree about the removal of www… but the complete removal of the suffixes and the protocols would be a mistake, if for only of reasons of readability, which you touched on. You’d have to rewrite the browsers to accommodate for these omissions.