Comments on: www. is not deprecated

By: Per Wiklander

Per Wiklander — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:07:18 +0000

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?

By: Benjamin T

Benjamin T — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:14:17 +0000

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.

By: Carl

Carl — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:51:19 +0000

“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.

By: Dirk

Dirk — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:40:29 +0000

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.

By: Norbert

Norbert — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:19:25 +0000

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!

By: IO ERROR

IO ERROR — Sun, 09 May 2010 23:43:24 +0000

Those aren’t URLs, for one thing.

Eventually a DNS-based approach may resolve that problem, but that will be a long time coming.

By: Mark T

Mark T — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:48:09 +0000

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!

By: Mark T

Mark T — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:46:38 +0000

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.

By: Miff

Miff — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:08:32 +0000

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.

By: kersurk

kersurk — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:48:10 +0000

Hi,
http protocol IS www, so www is just a leftover, so no-www.org ftw!