To www Or Not To www

You are an idiot!

Are you kidding me? The author of this article at yes-www.org completely misses the mark, as well as all (or at least most) of the commenters. Why are all the "experts" actually idiots? Anyway...

First, I would like to say that I completely agree with the statement made by the author. http://www. should always be at the beginning of a root domain URL (http://www.example.com). The reason has nothing to do with protocols, however. Nor does the reason have anything to do with hosts (at least not strictly speaking). First, let's examine some ridiculous claims about this debate.

The main reason I argue for leaving the www. in URLs is that it serves as a gentle reminder that there are other services than the Web on the Internet. Some of these, such as FTP and DNS, users typically use transparently without even realizing it. Others, such as e-mail, users access through separate applications. Even so, I know of many users who will claim with a straight face that e-mail is not part of the Internet.

This is just plain wrong. http://www. has nothing to do with protocol. When using a web browser, people intend to browse the web. Therefore, http:// is completely unnecessary, in terms of entering an address. However, www has nothing to do with the protocol. Web is presented as http protocol requests. www is a concept indicating a network. As several comments on this post stated, if you want something other than http:// then enter it!!! (ftp://example.com)

I think you just made my argument for me, and betrayed your lack of knowledge of how the Internet works. :) First off, www is not a “subdomain,” it’s a “host.” Second, how do you intend to disambiguate the HTTP server and the FTP server, which may well be located on different hosts?

This too is just plain wrong. I love it when people are quick to point out others' ignorance when they themselves possess unsurpassed ignorance. Of course, their ignorance is based on arrogance, so that must not really count, right? *ahem*

We are talking about URLs here people!!! Remember what that stands for? Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are easily memorable names that are translated to IP addresses via DNS. The concept of a subdomain is simple. A top level domain (com, org, net, etc.) is prefixed with a domain name (example.com, something.org, etc.). This domain name--as a URL--can have many subdomains (images.example.com, mail.example.com). In terms of URLs, these are subdomains.

However, a URL is translated to an IP address, so images.example.com could--but is not required to--be a different address (or host) from mail.example.com.

As for http://www. in the URL, the reasoning for its use is simple. If a site is using subdomains, it would be consistent for the root website (under http protocol, duh--no one cares about this fact for this debate) to be at the subdomain www. Why, you may ask? Historical reasons? No! And yes!

Historically, the www subdomain indicated a website on a domain, or the host on a network serving the website represented by a domain (www.pepsi.com). Today, it could indicate a root website or a root/default host (www.google.com vs. mail.google.com). Therefore, for consistency if nothing else, www should always be in the URL! So the question remains, do we force our users to remember/understand/use http://www??? Absolutely not!!! What a waste of time and effort by everyone involved. Redirect, for the love of God! If someone visits http://example.com, they should be 301 redirected to http://www.example.com.

Finally, another extremely good reason to use www as a subdomain involves shared hosts and multi-faceted websites. If you have a brain, and you're using a shared host (or even a home-grown server for that matter), you organize your websites properly. For example, let's say you own example.com and something.org. In your html root directory (where all html content is stored and served from), you ought to have two folders, like this:

• example/
• something/

Most likely, example.com is not the only site/host/domain you will use for example.com. You will likely have blog.example.com or images.example.com or something! But of course, you have a site at example.com itself (that is, on the default subdomain www.example.com). So your folder structure should be like this:

• example/
  • www/
  • images/
  • blog/
    
• something/
  • www/

Your organization scheme should map one-to-one with your subdomain scheme. And for consistency, you should always be using subdomains (ie. www, images, blog). Notice how all of these subdomains are web related. If you happen to have other hosts using subdomains, everything will still play nice (mail.example.com). See?

If you disagree with me, you're an idiot.