“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.”
Saying someone is too lazy to do something usually implies it’s something worth doing. Are you “too lazy” to count from one to ten every hour on the hour?
There was a famous virus called the cookie monster that would pop up every now and then and say “give me a cookie”, and you had to type in the word “cookie” to go back to using your computer. Requiring your users to type “www.” essentially makes you the modern-day version of that virus.
Well, I do not think that the question whether to use ww or not is trivial. Because as Paul Annesly correctly pointed out, using a non-www-version of a webpage will lead to setting cookies for the whole domain, thus making cookieless domains (for example for fast cdn-like access of static resources like css, js and images) impossible.
And while the url obviously ist a little shorter without www., the branding and recognition of urls in offline media seems to be better using www as prefix (since nobody bothers to print out the http://.
So I generelly recommend allowing both ways of accessing a domain while forwarding the non-www to the www-version.
The http:// specifies the protocol and has nothing to do with the fact that some people think they are surfing some kind of web so replacing it with “web” is really stupid.
And I have never seen a browser that requires you to type that in, just type the domain and it assumes the http protocol.
Removing the top domain is impossible, why would .com be implied ?? I know IE sometimes does that depending on language settings but that’s just stupid, why would a certain top domain be preferred over another ?
Of course both www.domain.top and domain.top should work, since we have to live with people thinking the www is part of some kind of standard, other than that the domain name system and the protocol is just fine, don’t touch it, or are you looking for an AOL keyword system int he future with reserved words and sentences ??
Put me down as the ‘I don’t type in the URL box, I type in the Google box’ crowd. It makes a lot more sense. In FireFox and in IE both bars are right at the top of the browser.
If I type ‘codinghorror’ into the search box I’ll find myself here. If I type ‘coddinghorror’ or ‘codinghoror’ into the search box, I get a ‘Did you mean…’ and bam, I find myself here.
But if I mistype a URL into the address bar there is no telling what I might find. People go out of their way to buy domain names that are common typo’s of popular names.
Going through a trustworthy search engine is just good practice. It also means not having to worry about ‘www’ or not or if the site was .com or .org.
Google Webmaster Tools has an option to “Set preferred domain”, where you can choose if Google will provide search results for your site with or without the www.
I think URLs with www look better and more web-ish. To people who are not geeks they might as well look more familiar and “right”.
I also think that a www. in front of the domain gives a certain counterbalance to the .com in the end. So I always use it. And yes I’m printing it on the business cards and I expect no one to say the www when they read the address.
And the cookie issue which Paul Annesley, above, already mentioned is another factor.
The www prefix is implicit and assumed outside the address bar. Even if you use it – and many of the biggest sites on the internet still do – nobody says the dub-dub-dub any more, and certainly you’re not printing “www” on your logos and business cards and so forth.
I agree with most points, but not this. I like seeing www.* before urls in print (and of course online).
And www.is a subdomain, so www.whatever.codinghorror.com is really ugly (but should work for the “www is always mandatory” crowd.
If we’re going to start dropping the www why not go with Tim Berners-Lee’s suggestions for making the whole URL more standard, reversing the current order of specificity (TLD-domain-subdomain). He even suggests dropping the double slashes:
http://com.codinghorror.www/blog/archives/
It sounds horrid to say, but looks much better to me as a programmer.
Great minds etc. At least I know I didn’t make it up and really did say that.
@Julian it DOES look lopsided without the www. I’d never thought of it before but yep…
http://technorati.com
…is definitely missing something.
It’s as if you need the www to shield you from the suckiness of the anal, pretentious, and socially maladjusted http:// scheme specifier… obviously if they’d been reading Coding Horror (assuming CH had been around back in those days) we’d have a better web… ah well. One day we nerds will learn to stop ramming our oppressive nerd data/schema/specifiers/syntax down the throats of normal people…
@Walsh, @Ferguson - Google’s BigTable distributed storage system basically uses that method (reversed hostname) to create Webtable keys:
For example, in Webtable, pages in the same domain are grouped together into contiguous rows by reversing the hostname components of the URLs. For example, we store data for maps.google.com/index.html under the key com.google.maps/index.html. Storing pages from the same domain near each other makes some host and domain analyses more efficient.
I don’t care about whether it’s with www. or not, just as long as I don’t need to type it in. I never ever type in www. , even for my college website which requires the www. I always type it without www. first then realise my mistake. THey even redesigned their website recently, would have thought they’d correct that.
I use Ctrl+Enter a lot, but have found myself using “g website” in Opera a lot recently.
When I’m watching someone use the internet and they actually type in the www. I feel genuinely frustrated at them. If it’s a .com and they don’t use Ctrl+Enter then I get frustrated too, my friend types the www. for that too I feel like removing them from the computer. It’s perfectly computer literate and I used to make a point of saying “Ctrl+Enter” but he still persists typing it all out.
Now you just have to practice what you preach and pick one URL for your fakeplasticrock site as neither the www or non-www version redirect to the other!
Back when my DNS server and my web server were administered by different people, the fact that example.com had to be an A record (but www.example.com could be a CNAME) complicated matters.
(These days, I use a single dedicated service for both.)
