Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

www is deprecated

Published on November 30, 2003
By Pete Freitag
web

According to no-www www. is deprecated. They are trying to persuade people to use site.com instead of www.site.com. The site defines three levels of compliance: Class A your site allows either, Class B your site redirects all www requests, and Class C your site does not define the www subdomain.

I wouldn't go making your site's Class C anytime soon though (they have 59 sites listed that have done so already, though the site is Class B!). How many clients do you have that can't access their web mail because they type www.mail.domain.com instead of mail.domain.com. The www is almost implicit nowadays - not going anywhere.


www is deprecated was first published on November 30, 2003.

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Comments

I guess I can see where those folks are coming from... if I had a list of 101 Web Annoyances, one of 'em would be sites that are *only* accessible via www.foo.com, with plain ol' foo.com being unreachable.

Given the trivial amount of effort required to support both, though, I have no idea why anyone would prefer one to the exclusion of the other. Of course, people are strange. :D
by Roger Benningfield on 12/01/2003 at 1:24:59 AM UTC
how many people even know that the www. part of the domain is a subdomain. how many even know such a thing as subdomain exists. i could bet 80% (or even) more of the web's users are oblivious to this. www. is not going anywhere--at least, for a while--not until nanotechnology becomes mainstream and the 80% out there (we are excluded, of course) are enhaced by some cheap-but-powerful AI that super increases their adoption/understanding of new technology and its underlying structure, and we all drop English and start speaking in CF and AS, and I become president of the USA and... ;P
by eokyere on 12/01/2003 at 11:09:44 AM UTC
how many people even know that the www. part of the domain is a subdomain. how many even know such a thing as subdomain exists. i could bet 80% (or even) more of the web's users are oblivious to this. www. is not going anywhere--at least, for a while--not until nanotechnology becomes mainstream and the 80% out there (we are excluded, of course) are enhaced by some cheap-but-powerful AI that super increases their adoption/understanding of new technology and its underlying structure, and we all drop English and start speaking in CF and AS, and I become president of the USA and... ;P
by eokyere on 12/01/2003 at 11:09:50 AM UTC
I agree Roger, that sites that only work with www. are annoying. So if nothing else maybe this will persuade those admins to setup both.
by Pete Freitag on 12/01/2003 at 3:33:55 PM UTC
I had a site once that didn't have the www and I was constantly reminding people "no www", because they'd always type it! It's a usability issue. People expect it, type it, and if it doesn't work they don't come back to your site.
by Dustin Boston on 06/04/2004 at 11:42:20 AM UTC