I prefer the abberviation 3-Dub. It’s much faster and most people don’t get it the first time they here it (self included). Hopefully this makes them consider how inferior Dub-Dub-Dub or worse DoubleU-DoubleU-DoubleU is to 3-Dub. It’s only 2 syllables and much easier to type.
Bikeshed discussion := “saying/not saying www”. Now that’s easy to remember.
I find it more convenient to Internet search the url of something I type these days. Instead of typing the prefix http://www.codinghorror..., I just type “g coding horror” and then get ready for the mouse clicking or whatever. (Even if I use w3m in emacs)
Your post is a reminder to make it easier to do the latter. In other words, do the technical side right, so the users can be as casual about it as possible.
I’m not that old, but I remember a time when not every hostname on the Internet was a web server.
I’ve always hated the www convention. It’s completely arbitrary. But it’s become so widely used that it’s almost part of the protocol by now. I’ve observed a lot of users that think www. is a required part of every URL. Sites like del.icio.us are totally inaccessible to them, because they’ll invariably type www.del.icio.us or even www.del.icio.us.com, and get one of those impostor advert sites.
Brendan Small FTW!
I remember the time when you used to email /etc/hosts to each other.
In Firefox, just typing “codinghorror” or even “codding horror” into the address bar gives the proper site www.codinghorror.com/blog without any problems. This works for most sites that aren’t at the top of my URL history.
I agree with the redundant ‘www’… I remember the early days of the internet, BEFORE http, when the protocol was used to determine which host handled the request (e.g., ftping to example.com would send you ftp.example.com).
However, for the non-US audience, the .com is far from redundant. Not to mention various non-profits, education institues, etc.
Sadly my university’s CS site breaks if you don’t enter www and it’s a subdomain too.
what’s worst for me is when users assume the “www” on things like our web-access mail, mail.domain.tld/exch.
You’ve nailed it right on the head, re: using an Internet search to navigate to websites.
I’ve watched many family, friends and colleagues navigate to their favorite website and I’m amazed at how many of them will always use a search engine to get there.
The conversation I end up having with them about how to simply type in a domain name in lieu of using a search engine ends up sounding like the Home Movie animation.
dub dub dub is dead…
I remember way back when there was a small group of websters who tried to change the convention from www to web, as in http://web.example.com. I wish that had taken hold.
I say make both work, then what difference does it make? I just don’t see the reason to argue about it.
EHaskins:
I say make both work, then what difference does it make? I just don’t see the reason to argue about it.
Arguing about minor/unimportant issues is the lifeblood of the internet!
In french, we commonly say “3 w”, wich is simple and painless in our language. Very few people use the http:// prefix anymore.
Hi Jeff, I notice stackoverflow can be accessed via either form- now when you install the 301 redirect which way are you going to go?
It’s true that “www” may be passe… for technocrats… but average users still expect the “www”. Which is presumably why Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun, et al. all enforce “www” as the canonical version (via 301 redirect).
Technorati and Digg, on the other hand, remove the “www” (via 301 redirect).
Interesting, that. The more “blogcentric” a site gets, the less likely they are to use “www”. Meanwhile, it seems like most of the big guns (it would be interesting to see some hard numbers) still use the “www”.
If www is good enough for Google/Jeff Atwood, it’s good enough for me.
ok, I was reading your comments, and I read that prefix thingy in my head so many times, it really started bugging me, like a bad song stuck in my head.
I’ve seen where example.net and www.example.net went to two completely different sites.
I always just thought it was lazy if you didn’t type the WWW. I’ve never checked my sites to see if they don’t work. If people aren’t willing to type the WWW, then they clearly aren’t the caliber of people i want to frequent my site anyways.
Now how about the (even more trivial) debate about the trailing forward slash on URLs? 
I believe the trailing slash is prefered, it has something to do with allowing the web server to skip some kind of lookup process… I remember reading about it years ago in an article for optimizing sites since everyone was still on 28.8 modems back then, but all the details are a bit fuzzy now.
I’m not that old, but I remember a time when not every hostname on the Internet was a web server.
That’s still the case. The point is that technically it isn’t the www that designates it as a web server, it’s the http://. (Yes, the http that you don’t even have to bother typing in because if you’re in a web browser, it assumes unless you specify otherwise that you intend to go to a web site.)
And it’s not a per-hostname thing either. There were (and no doubt still are) sites you can hit either as a web host or an ftp site. There was even some goofy lyrics site that started off as an ftp site then added a web interface which you’d access by going to http://ftp.whatever.com/.
I don’t like “www” because it’s just a convention and it’s usually redundant. What is the point of this:
http://www.somesite.com/
ftp://ftp.somesite.com/
Yes, it might have made sense when these had to be separate, easily distinguished machines AND when it wasn’t clear that http was going to become by far the dominant way of accessing information on the web.
But today, how about if the protocol just defaults http for a web client and ftp for an ftp client? And you only have to bother specifying it if you’re doing something unexpected?
It already works that way today for a ton of sites, and it’s been proven there are no problems at all with this, so “www.” is just a waste of everyone’s time.
As for getting rid of tld suffixes, that’s great, too. I hated it when they introduced a bunch of new TLDs a few years back. Now, in addition to knowing the company name, I’m supposed to know if it’s arbitrarily ended up on .com, .net, .info, .web, or whatever? You’re telling me codinghorror.com, codinghorror.net, codinghorror.info, and codinghorror.web might all be different, valid sites? I say that’s nonsense. They might as well be the equally arbitrary codinghorror.1, codinghorror.2, codinghorror.3, and codinghorror.4.
But that’s another discussion. The point is losing the www. loses us nothing. As someone else said, www. is so 1990s. URLs without it look cleaner and correspond to how most people say them.