www-less
Let’s suppose that all the domain names start with “www.”, like “www.name.com”. This means that the leading “www.” doesn’t apport any information (because, as we supposed, every domain has it). You could just as well trasmit your name as “name.com”, knowing that the receiver will automatically add the necessary leading “www.”.
I mean that the leading “www.” doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s just a sort of historical garbage, and will be dispensed of. Your website name should be “name.com”. The domain “www.name.com” would redirect to the canonic domain, “name.com”.
This has the advantage that your name is shorter. A short name is friendlier for your users, because it’s they who have to type it, write it down, etc.
The dropping of the leading “www.” is already happening on the web; in a few year’s time, “www.” will be history. This gives us an easy way to spot the web dinosaurs, the domainers who are stuck in the past; a dinosaur is a domain which can only be accessed as “www.name.com”, while the shorter form “name.com” gives an error.
An example: www.whois.eu works, while whois.eu doesn’t work — Eurid, the operator of whois.eu (sorry, I meant to say www.whois.eu), is the paradoxical new dinosaur on the web.
June 13th, 2006 at 10:50
Using the www prefix in print (e.g., advertising material) helps indicating that you refer to a website. This is especially true for new or uncommon TLDs (e.g., .info, .eu, etc.). Otherwise you have to say http://name.com, which is more awkward than using www.
June 13th, 2006 at 12:30
On my mobile phone application I wanted to indicate the app website’s URL. As you say, I had the choice between:
http://menstral.net/ and www.menstral.net
The www-variant is 4 characters shorter than the http:// form, and the lenght is just more important on the small mobile display. The http:// URL wouldn’t even fit on a single line.
So this is one useful aspect of “www.”. That’s why I propose to have “www.name.com” redirecting to “name.com”, rather than reject “www.name.com” altogether.