danielmiessler.com - Latest Comments in It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Website Design Chester — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:11:13 -0000

An interesting topic of discussion here. I agree with "PC Pete" in the fact that using the "www" in print makes it clear that a website is being referenced. The thing that still amazes me is that most people still type a web address into a search bar instead of a the browsers address bar!

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Dean — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:15:45 -0000

Just get everyone to stop saying "double-U" three times and make up a new word for it, or we could say "triple-double-u" at only five syllables (Nearly a 50% savings!) or "six-u"; that's only two syllables (Over 75% OFF!) Seriously, what do we do about those who insist on typing www-dot in front of every address even when you don't say it?

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Chuck — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:09:58 -0000

I recommend using uuuuuu instead of www. The existence of a "w" has peeved me forever. I mean, we don't have a "double-o" or a "double-e", right? Just how hard is it to continue to hold the key down, anyway?

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Keith — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:04:35 -0000

I have to agree with this story. It is perhaps time to drop the "www" prefix to domain name, as they simply serves not much of a purpose. I have started trimming off the www on some of my sites, and I find that they work equally well.

However, it is best to careful when switching from a "www" domain to a non-www domain name, as it may temporarily result in a loss of traffic and page indexing on search engine. It has to be done with extra care. You definitely will not want to result in loss of traffic.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Daniel Miessler — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:43:04 -0000

@Bear

It doesn't shoot down the idea. As I said in the piece, the concept isn't to abolish hostnames -- only to point the root of the domain to the main web content. And by the way, you can just do the same with your setup as well. Send the external DNS queries to your internal DNS server, and point the root to the IP address of your web content. This isn't a discussion of eliminating options -- just changing default behavior.

But the purpose is not to say what's best for everyone, but rather what's best for the Internet and its users in general.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Bear — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:36:10 -0000

Oops. I see my comment above doesn't read very well because I didn't think and used characters that were interpreted as invalid html tags and were dropped. I should have used something like [mydomain] instead of (open chevron)mydomain(close chevron). (whatever). should have been (whatever).[mydomain] and www. should have been www.[mydomain].
Sorry about that.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Bear — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:31:32 -0000

Well, the www performs a real and useful purpose for me. I have my own internal network with multiple systems. I have a gateway with a single static ip address that is visible to the internet. My router port maps various incoming connections to specific different machines on my internal network (http, smtp, etc.) I also have my own DNS servers. On my internal network, my dns servers map (whatever). to my specific internal ip addresses that are not visible to the outside world, but the map (for example) www., mail., smtp. etc. to my public static ip address. So, a dns lookup that just specifies will resolve to one of my internal network addresses, none of which are directly reachable from the public internet, while a dns query for www. will resolve to my public address - reachable from the outside world. I think this shoots down the idea that the www. prefix serves no purpose and isn't needed.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

elend — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:09:06 -0000

It is not true that www is totally useless. Here is an exemple:
Try http://mms.t-mobile.de and then http://www.mms.t-mobile.de. See any difference ?

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Mark Guertin — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:34:39 -0000

Ahh but there's a bit of a problem with this ... what happens when the site that people really need to go to is say, http://test.example.com ... well of course people type in www.test.example.com and tell you that the URL you have given them doesn't work. I routinely add www. in front of all my third level domains that need public access to prevent many such emails like "You're site doesn't work"

While I agree with this in theory it's going to be an uphill battle. It's like people saying Kleenex instead of tissue ... it wasn't nipped in the bud early enough. You'd be amazed (or maybe not) at how many people think that a site address is not correct if it doesn't have www. in front of it and that's going to be a tough one to get out there.

Lastly if you have your www third level domain pointing at your main top level domain, what's the point of this excercise? To save the unwashed masses from having to type www. ? Anyone who cares about SEO at all will have both addresses land at the same place with mod_rewrite or something similar, so again, what's the point of this .. considering that more often than ot people will redirect blah.com to www.blah.com ... which completely undoes this whole movement.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

thomas anderson — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:49:59 -0000

who types www? nobody. just type the name of the domain eg. hotmail, then hit ctrl enter. it does the www and .com for you.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

subcorpus — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:24:03 -0000

www ...
its just a bit harder to say ...
not hard to write or type ...
so its Ok for me ...
i seldom tell people my address aloud ...
i text it ... email it ... or IM it ...
no trouble at all ...

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Eric — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:00:12 -0000

http://www.dmiessler.com/

Drives you crazy, doesn't it?

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Lunacite — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:49:07 -0000

I do phone tech support, and the majority of the time I tell them to go to "mail.yourdomain.com" to get webmail, they end up at "www.mail.yourdomain.com"
Annoying to no end.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Jerry Seinfeld — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:02:46 -0000

I agree with this movement

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Cifra -wwwSnob — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:48:36 -0000

They should build a website called use friggin .htaccess! mod_rewrite for ever

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Jesus — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:32:52 -0000

This is exactly why most people should keep their opinions to themselves

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Ivan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:18:49 -0000

To add to that, your blog's comment script does not convert ccny.cuny.edu to a link automatically, but it does so for www.ccny.cuny.edu. How would a script recognize that I am typing in a web address unless I typed in http:// or www?

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Ivan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:17:10 -0000

ccny.cuny.edu does not work unless you type in www.ccny.cuny.edu. Ridiculous...

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

KMXZ — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:53:31 -0000

Unless your company's only service is HTTP to access a web site, keep the www. If your company is primarily an email service; having domainname.com == mail.domainname.com would make more sense.

If you really hate the 3 w's, just keep one w.
http://w.dmiessler.com
Gives you the benefit of distinguishing your www stuff from your ftp stuff; and if the two extra characters bug you that much, you save 2/3 of them.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Berto — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:36:51 -0000

Well, using the same reasoning you don't need any of these:

www.domain.com
ftp.domain.com
jabber.domain.com
irc.domain.com
smtp.domain.com
imap.domain.com
...

You could use 'domain.com' in all cases... if all services are under the same IP.

If you have, say, 'smtp.domain.com' then you can change the SMTP server IP if you need to
and no one will notice it.

However if everybody is using 'domain.com' for everything then you'll have a problem if you
want any of these services to be in another host.

The internet is more than the world wide web.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

RETARDED — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:35:13 -0000

this is RETARDED, why not just use numbers, since they are faster to type in?

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Levi Blackman — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:10:41 -0000

My website has been accessible via both www and no www for a while now. I agree, all websites should take advantage of this feature, and I think most do.

For some reason though, maybe out of habit, I still type the full http://www.mywebsite.com when coding and making links.

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Arslan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:50:17 -0000

How about typing in the name of webste only like : yahoo and press ctrl+enter browsers add all the required stuff themselves [:P]

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

Cifra -wwwSnob — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:50:10 -0000

Oh come on people. NOBODY CARES

Re: It’s Time to Drop the “www”

me — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:48:15 -0000

With Mozilla, you don't even have to type a ".com."