To www or not to www
Dooncha, one of the pundits of wordpress has raised a question in his blog thus:-
…why do people still put the “www.” in front of long-winded urls? It gets stripped by WordPress.com anyway. Why not put ‘http://’ there instead? Makes more sense to me. Three cheers for the no-www movement!
But his views have not gone well majority of his readers, as revealed in by the comments recorded. Here are some excerpts:-
- www. takes up less space in print (or screen space or wherever else you display it). Plus, www. lets them know it is a website without it looking complicated to people.
- Joe Non-techie still thinks www. means website.
- …without exception, when I told them to go to files.ourcompanysite.com they typed www.files.ourcompanysite.com.
- I do think your average domain address looks more symmetrical with the www.
- People instantly recognize text beginning with “www.” as being a web site address. Not so much the “http://”
- Anyone ever gone looking for http://unesco.org/ ?! (S.K: You have to add the prefix “www.” to get the web site of UNESCO!)
Dooncha had also made a mention of the “No-WWW” movement. The web site enunciates the “No-www.org philosophy” thus:
No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.
The site also states the reason why “www.” is deprecated:
Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.
Having read all the arguments pro and against the use of the blessed “www”, I personally feel that it is much ado about a non-issue. Mainly because the browser (I mean “Firefox”. If you use some other client which is still exploring the internet, you have a problem in hand!), does the job of adding the protocol and the www prefix – “http://www.” and the most popular “.com” generic top level domain, automagically if you write “cyberbrahma” on the address bar and then press “CTRL+Enter”. Why bother about www’s and http’s!
For .net and .org domains, the keyboard shortcuts are “shift+Enter” and “Ctrl+shift+enter” respectively.
As regards the websites like “unesco.org” who refuse to show their face if you fail to add their “www” consort, the reason is that their “A records” of the “Zone file” of the domains have not been properly configured. Ok, if this is too geeky for you, forget it. You can still bring home the bacon!
