www.codinghorror.com - Launches browser
I never knew you could do that. In Vista you just hit the windows key, type a domain name with the www and it launches right into it.
That’s pretty cool!
The www is generally redundant, but also needed for those odd browsers that don’t assume the prefix. I would put as the same accommodation made for anyone who does not have a touch-tone phone. The minute the accommodation goes away, these folks complain.
As far assuming a .com suffix, that’s bad. Typing ussticonderoga.com takes me to one web site, ussticonderoga.org to another, and ussticonderoga.net gets a server not found. This doesn’t include .uk, .ca, .nl, .de, etc,.
I’ve heard 3-dub dot [domain]
HA, now the rest of society can enjoy terminology wars and not just us I.T. g33ks.
Now how about the (even more trivial) debate about the trailing forward slash on URLs? 
http://www.codinghorror.com
http://www.codinghorror.com/
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Double U Double U Double You …
I pronounce it Wibble …(From Blackadder …)
… People do assume www. and it is hard to get them to type anything else … “it’s mail.xxx, no not www.mail.xxx just mail.xxx !!”
http://httpcolonforwardslashforwardslashwwwdotjenniferdanieldotcom.com/
should be how all URLs look.
You know what the funyn thing is:
“World wide web” is spoken faster than “double-u double-u doublu”.
That’s why here in Germany we don’t have this problem so much. “www” is pronounced “v v v”, quick and easy. Of course it is omitted quite often anyway, but there is not really any discussion about it.
We can place the blame for this squarely on Netscape Navigator’s shoulders. They were the first to implement the feature whereby if you simply entered a word in the address bar it would try likely FQDN permutations for you.
For example: if you entered pizza, it woudl try www.pizza.com, then www.pizza.org, then www.pizza.net.
This is also a large part of the reason for the dot-com land grab, and why the army has goarmy.com and such domains as westchestercountygov.com also exist.
Also, let’s recall that in the early days of the web, most servers that were operating the A-record FQDN (e.g. example.com) was typically the mail server, (e.g. mybox@example.com) so as folks started fielding web servers, they added the www.example.com alias so that if they wanted to move the new web server thing off of the main box, onto another, they only had to change the CNAME record for www.example.com.
In many cases, example.com == www.example.com, but that is not a universal truth.
and we should have kiboshed www for web early on. But again, the browser auto-prepending www to a ‘bare’ domain name made that counterproductive.
However, I think we can all agree that there is no such thing as a “forward slash”, nor a “backward slash”.
Only slash and backslash.
I have seen ‘sextupleyou’ in the past. (www - 3 double u’s - 32u - 6*u - sextupleyou) it was not a dirty site, but it did get stuck on the web filter.
I hardly ever type the www, but then when I’m stuck with IE, I find that it doesn’t recognise all the uk’s subdomains, so things like *.nhs.uk and maybe even *.ac.uk get redirected to a search page if you don’t type the www in first. Which is a pain. And yes, most NHS sites won’t let you use anything but IE, for obvious standardisation reasons.
Like in Germany, in Italy we use another letter instead of “w”. We say “vvv” (pronounced “vu vu vu”), and we usually omit the first dot (typing a dot after “www”, has become common for everyone). So www.google.com becomes “vu vu vu google punto com” (“punto” being “dot”).
Saying “www” (“doppia vu doppia vu doppia vu”) would really be too long and tedious
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I’ve used the triple-dub as the sub-domain that it is for purposes of anything from port-forwarding to specific web-app “redirection”. So, sometimes if it seems to break, it could just be a sysadmin that isn’t too worried about it 
- I do agree though, it is nearly ubiquitous.
Forget the WWW part, I always cracked up when I saw HTTP:// on the back of a truck or on some billboard back in the .com days… heck, even now. C’mon people, you’re not showing your technical prowess by showing HTTP:// … 95% of the real world (or as I call them. The Others) couldn’t tell you what it stands for.
None of my websites have the dub-dub-dub before it, but all of them work even if you do put it. Every visitor to www.aalaap.com gets redirected to aalaap.com and so on.
Dreamhost makes this very easy - there’s a section for the dub-dub-dub setting with three option: always use www, use both www and just the domain, or remove the www and just domain. I use the last one.
http://fakeplasticrock.com
http:// means web more than www. does
www. doesn’t mean anyting really
Awesome! Home Movies reference! I agree, I think the most important thing is just sticking with one or the other but still redirecting. Some old farts (in internet years) like myself still type “http://” into the address bar, an old habit I can’t seem to kick!
This has implications on a number of things, perhaps most importantly cookie handling. The standard “www.” prefix also provides a service disambiguator that allows delegation of the “www” service for a domain to a set of particular A records (or CNAME/DNAME).
Some people believe that SRV records will eventually supplant the www. prefix, but in the meantime it provides a critical ability to send traffic to one particular location for particular services (imagine how a big service like Google would have to structure their network in order provide the same set of services on all their google.com IP addresses).
Logic rules, at last.
We should track all those things that can be qualified as “waste of time”, or even a source of problems, and move them away as a compressor does with redundancies. Taking it to the limit, I imagine one day when there will be no flag better than other, or no religion better than other, or no sport team better than other, or no god better than other… (did I crossed the line? Oh, yes, sorry). I meant that, as we progress, we must have no fear to change our ways and identify the superfluous loads that didn’t solve anything, and even created troubles. That’s how life made progress from millions years ago.
Removing “www” should not be a problem, it recalls us that we must be flexible and ready to always optimize our mental way of thinking - our software!