WWW Required
Posted October 31st, 2005 @ 08:02am by Erik J. Barzeski
I've written about this before… a Web site configured such that "www" (or its absence) causes the site to fail to work. Today I found another: http://edinboro.edu/ times out while http://www.edinboro.edu/ works quickly.
Silly!
FWIW, I hate "www." I think it's redundant and useless. "url.com" should go to the same place as "www.url.com" and, particularly with non-.com TLDs (like .net, .org, etc.) I'd rather keep my typing to a minimum: "edinboro.edu" saves four keystrokes. For .coms, of course, I just type nslog/blah and let Safari take care of the rest; that it adds "www." doesn't bother me too much.
Donate Life
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 8:10am #
Agreed. I don't understand the hosts that don't get this right. I experience it quite often with .no TLDs. My dad, providing hosting services, have been making the case of the unnecessary "www" for a long time 🙂
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 8:16am #
Heh, noticed just now that I commented on this the last time as well. Yeah, it must be quite a pet-peeve of mine too! The second comment on your last post on the topic was also a good read again.
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 8:21am #
Some hosting providers have their home page appear for any domain accessed without the www. That's close to domain hijacking, I don't understand how they customenrs let them get away with it.
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 9:40am #
I don't really care about that so much, but two related things that annoy me are:
- spoken URLs (like on TV) don't work. Example: while the TV shows "www.today.msnbc.com," Katie & Matt only actually say "today.msnbc.com." Many times, the actual spoken URL does not work - the implied www is required. How stupid.
- static URLs that don't end in a slash. I've relaxed on this one a lot, but I still prefer nice clean URLs that go to directories with an index file, instead of directly to a file.
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 12:03pm #
On my domain names, I used to have http://www.blah.tld work identically to blah.tld; but I decided that I shouldn't be defining two separate locatable URIs for every resource (and they are technically two separate URIs, even if they look almost the same), so instead, I now set http://www.blah.tld to redirect to blah.tld. That's working well.
Here's a good site dealing with this sensitive issue: http://no-www.org/ . They do it the same way as I do, redirecting http://www.no-www.org to no-www.org.
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 12:49pm #
Ugh, yes, I hate this so very much too. And worst of all, my university ( http://stanford.edu/ oh whoops sorry http://www.stanford.edu/ ) has this problem. I have to remember to e-mail someone about that to get it changed...
-- Simone
Posted 31 Oct 2005 at 8:57pm #
I can understand the viewpoints of the "no-www" crowd, but I personally prefer the explicitness of the www.
Another reason why it may be preferred by some sites is that if you make use of a Content Delivery Network (such as Akamai), the standard practice is to make your site (www. or whatever) a CNAME of an Akamai hostname. If you wanted to put the domain on Akamai (instead of a subdomain) you would need to use Akamai as your nameserver (since you can't CNAME the domain). This is obviously less flexible than running your own nameservers.
Posted 02 Nov 2005 at 2:07am #
You can even set this up at your registrar... register.com allows this.