It does however add “http” unneccesarily.

Will wordpress understand and hyperlink http://www.fribit.no or http://www.fribit.no? (with a question mark directly behind it) Probably yes.

Will wordpress understand and hyperlink fribit.no or fribit.no? Probably no.

It’s a simple fact of life; nobody gives a damn about this, so why give a damn about it? It’s not like typing www will cause a nuclear melt-down underneath the White House.

However, if you search Google for “Twitter”, Google displays http://www.twitter.com (yes-www) in their listing, but this redirects to http://twitter.com (no-www).

Does that mean Twitter have wrongly configured the www preference option in webmaster tools?

the http:// protocol exists for a reason.

If you want to view a website in your browser, you would go to http://website.com/.
If you want to access a server via ftp, you would go to ftp://website.com/.

It’s the “subdomain” pointing to the root of your “publicly accessible directory”.
That’s why you should use the “www.” prefix, and why dropping that “www.” prefix is preferred when using other subdomains like “my.example.com”.

I read people’s talk about protocols and “ftp. & www.” contra “ftp:// & http://” and I really have to wonder what the hell they think they are talking about. If you don’t know what you’re saying, better keep you mouth closed.

An example for your information:

http://www.example.com/help/index.html?id=123#top

http:// is the protocol
www is the subdomain
example.com is the domain
/help/ is the directory
index.html is the filename
?id=123 is the query string
#top is the anchor (or hash)