

Ask HN: Is www. deprecated? - olalonde

Really, why does (nearly) every website start with  www. instead of allowing access directly through their main domain? Wouldn't it be time to call the death of the www subdomain? What is HN's opinion on the matter?
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anigbrowl
Agree completely. I am surprised it has persisted so long; the positive reason
I can think of is that people are familiar enough with it that 'w w w dot
(something)' is a useful cue for people listening to radio or TV adverts, who
might otherwise not register the internet context until they hear the 'dot
com'.

For example 'Attention listeners! Are you sick of your nose? Get a new one at
Doctor Bob's rhinoplasty. Whether you want roman, retrousse, or rhonocerous,
we have them all in stock! Just go to...'

...our office on 5001 big highway? or nosesbybob.com? Of course, you could
signal with 'point your browser to...' but apparently a majority of people
don't even know what a browser is, they just think of it-and-the-web as 'the
internet'. So I think 'wwwdot'* will stick around as an aural cue.

On the other hand, any sysadmin who doesn't redirect automatically from the
main domain should be shot.

* There was once a comedy program on TV that used to read it out as 'wuh wuh wuh dot...,' and I have to admit that this is how I've always thought of the string in my own mind.

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gmac
I expect we can agree that (1) sites ought to be accessible by both the bare
domain name and the www subdomain, and (2) to avoid cross-domain
cookie/AJAX/analytics (etc.) issues, one should be chosen as the canonical
form, and the other silently redirected to that.

But which should be canonical?

Recently I tend to go for the bare domain for sites with a more technical
audience, and www for sites I hope will attract some more normal visitors.

My feeling is that most of the times I speak a URL to someone non-technical,
they mentally add www to it (they often clarify verbally that they're doing
that, too). Even if, like this site, it's already a subdomain. Seems like it's
comforting - why fight it?

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_delirium
There are some minor technical niceties with using www as the main one, in
that you can CNAME it to somewhere else, while you can't CNAME a bare domain.

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gdl
Yes, as of August 14, 2003. (Of course opinions may vary.)

<http://no-www.org/>

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mooism2
Allow access through both. Whether you default to using www or not is up to
you.

On the one hand it's four more characters to type, but on the other hand lots
of people still expect web addresses to start www.

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jagbolanos
Its information value is 0.

If it is just the website everybody just assumes www. is at the beginning,
ignore it (or type the domain name in google).

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madhouse
It should be dead for a few years by now.

