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WWW Required

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.

8 Responses to "WWW Required"

  1. 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 🙂

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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

  7. 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.

  8. You can even set this up at your registrar... register.com allows this.