Ever since the first traditional media ads began to appear with Web site addresses in them nearly ten years ago, people have been screwing them up. And unless you just got on the Internet yesterday, you’ve almost certainly done the same, and know many people who have as well.
Almost no one knew what http://www.pepsi.com/ meant at the bottom of that TV ad. Those who did almost certainly had mixed feelings about it. Until 1994 commercial activity on the Internet had been prohibited; when it was lifted many people feared the inevitable commercialization of the net. In hindsight, they were right. Now commerce runs rampant. Overall, though, this isn’t a bad thing. Sure, there are banner ads and spam, but the Internet also brought us Linux and eBay.
The thing is, in 1996 almost everyone on the Internet knew how to type in a URL. Now, in 2005, almost no one knows. They guess, and the browser makes its best attempt to find what the user had intended. Back then, virtually everyone dutifully typed http://www.pepsi.com/ into Mosaic or Netscape to see just what it was that Pepsi had put online. These days, many people will just type in www.pepsi.com or even pepsi.com or, believe it or not, just pepsi.
More people than you realize will take a URL, go to their favorite search engine, and type the URL into the search engine’s search field, never realizing they can actually edit the contents of the address bar above, or perhaps not even noticing it. I’ve even seen a few pathological cases where, given a URL, they will type www.google.com or another search engine into the address bar, and then type the URL they actually want to go to into Google’s search field!
I paint this bleak picture primarily for the benefit of Internet veterans who have been around the block a few times and actually understand a fairly good deal about how the technology underlying the Internet works, and who don’t deal with “normal” users on a regular basis. If my description of “normal” users above surprised, shocked or disappointed you, you’re the target audience.
What does all this have to do with “www.” in URLs?
Remember that some people always use it, some don’t, and some only use it if it was in the URL they were given. The source of this confusion is the simple fact that users today don’t understand two things. First, they don’t understand why the www. is (or isn’t) there, and second, they don’t understand that the Web is not the whole of the Internet.
The main reason I argue for leaving the www. in URLs is that it serves as a gentle reminder that there are other services than the Web on the Internet. Some of these, such as FTP and DNS, users typically use transparently without even realizing it. Others, such as e-mail, users access through separate applications. Even so, I know of many users who will claim with a straight face that e-mail is not part of the Internet.
The ultimate goal here is to reach at least a few of these people and turn some of the lights on in their heads.
Please note that I am in complete agreement with the no-www people that a domain’s main Web site should be accessible through both domain.com and www.domain.com. I argue, however, that www.domain.com is the preferred URL and that users going to domain.com should be redirected to www.domain.com.
I’m tired or people who argue that typing URI into the search engine is wrong! I do it for sites I have never been to for this reasons: typo, I can barely spell in any language and I don’t want to land in a phishing site. Google will rank first the correct domain for sure, even if I made a mistake. I do it for a prophylactic purpose, so should you. With the sites I have regularly encounters with, I don’t, I just use the bookmarks
NOTE: Also, you can check if the site has been flagged if you have McAfee Site Advisor.
Hi,
http protocol IS www, so www is just a leftover, so no-www.org ftw!
You don’t seem to know the difference between www and http. Other services then WWW such as FTP? You mean, I’ve been typing urls like “ftp://www.my-hosting-site.com/” wrong all this time?
If you really want to compare things other then WWW, then say like a home LAN or a corporate intranet, but not that.
To those who purport that it’s better to have http://www.example.com as you may also have irc.example.com for a web interface to IRC, or http://ftp.example.com as a web interface to FTP (WTFLOL?!
)… Why would you not go down the route of having example.com/irc, example.com/ftp and example.com/foobarservice? Services as hostnames are just spurious.
btw, those auto-linked URLs in the previous post were not supposed to be – I had only typed plain text; stupid pattern matching – if I want autolinked URLs, I’ll specify an http:// prefix!
Those aren’t URLs, for one thing.
Eventually a DNS-based approach may resolve that problem, but that will be a long time coming.
The author said:
“Until 1994 commercial activity on the Internet had been prohibited;[...]Overall, though, this isn’t a bad thing. Sure, there are banner ads and spam, but the Internet also brought us Linux and eBay.”
Linux, was started by Linus in 1991, by March 1994 V1.0 was released. Hence the lift of the commercial activity ban in 1994, could not possibly have any influence on the genesis of Linux. And therefore none of the woes associated with the lift of that ban on commercial activities can be balanced “Overall” by the existence of Linux. Linux pre-existed these woes!
Adding a www. subdomain to your domain for accessing the web page is like adding a mail. subdomain to your domain for your e-mail address.
“The ultimate goal here is to reach at least a few of these people and turn some of the lights on in their heads.”
You don’t reach/teach confused people by doing something that can only be explained by saying, “You don’t have to do it, but I just think it’s better this way.” Especially when it’s an issue nobody agrees on.
If you want people to better understand the internet, remove the confusing bits and leave only what’s necessary. Nobody, and I mean nobody, who isn’t technical will ever understand what the hell the www is there for, but they will continue to use it (without knowing why) as long as webmasters keep it around.
Take it away, and the internet will make just a tiny bit more sense to them.
I don’t really know how people reason sometimes. You do have different machines for different things (okay, my wardrobe server does http/ftp/mail/loadsofotherthings, but I’m talking production environment), right? Now, assuming you don’t just use an umbrella host (like the bare domain) and clever routing, you usually have one IP for each server (even more so when IPv6 gets some air under its wings). One subdomain for each IP. So, my http server should have the subdomain www. Easy.
“Adding a www. subdomain to your domain for accessing the web page is like adding a mail. subdomain to your domain for your e-mail address”. Now, what reasoning is that? Ever heard of MX records? Most mail servers does, indeed, run on mail.domain.tld; however, there are also MX records pointing to that server so that you can use the bare domain name for mailing. Completely different story. Completely unrelated.
Benjamin T: In the world I live in (the web hosting world) most http servers are reachable (through protocols like ssh and ftp) via a domain name like wwwprod17.farm.hostingcompany.com. Now what is the logic that dictates that Customer Company’s web site be reachable via http://www.costumercompany.com instead of http://costumercompany.com? Or even that the hosting company’s public facing site is on http://www.costumercompany.com?