You know that thing that now you shouldn’t use www. at the start of a domain name anymore? It’s a W3C standard, I’m sure, but I can’t find it on their site. Can you help me?
13 thoughts on “no more www.”
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I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, and Professor of Digital Culture. Blogging here since October 2000.
elzapp
I don’t really think its a web-standard, but a lot of people that are passionate for web-standards also pushes this view…
Check http://no-www.org/
Sindre Sandvik
I have not a clue as to where that might be, but
“[…]but I can‚Äôt find tit on their site. Can you help me?”
I’m not so sure that w3c’s webpage is the best/right place to look for that… ;p
(cheapshot I know, but it was too hard to resist)
H?•kon
Had it been a standard you would have found it in the Naming and Addressing section of their web site. I’ll be surprised if you find anything about it (and I’m not considering appendix F of rfc2396 as relevant).
It’ a myth, and the origin is probably a variety of bad explanations and gripes stating that the www prefix isn’t required. This may explain how “not required” becomes “shouldn’t use”.
i1277
Even though it’s technically redundant and it’s usually not a good idea to force technical and semantically meaningless stuff onto the user, I kinda like the wwww-prefix. As an “important” part of the URL-aesthetics, and www (or “vvv” as we pronounce it in Norwegian) is a symbol of the web itself.
joshlee
My understanding was that there wasn’t really a standard, just convention.
I never liked “www;” it’s almost impossible to say it out loud without sounding silly. “web” had a tiny bit of momentum as an alternate prefix, until people realized that the whole prefix thing was simply unnecessary.
Scott
Out loud, I’ve always gone with “triple-dub”; way easier to say than “dubbayoudubbayoudubbayou.”
nick
Don’t look to us Americans for help. We can’t even get rid of one “W.”
Jill
ROFL! Good one, Nick 🙂
Pity about the www. thing though. I had this idea it was writ in law. Perhaps I dreamt it. Leaves me with a little less clout when complaining to the University about their student.uib.no domain requiring http://www.student.uib.no...
i1277
Yeah, student.uib.no already has a subdomain, so www doesn’t seem right there. Of course there’s always rasmus.uib.no instead.
And thanks to Scott, it really was about time I realised why they call George W. “Dubya”.
Jesper
I must point to the important http://fuckwww.dk/ site.
vika
Can’t help you either, in practical terms; but it always amuses me to hear Italians pronounce www: “vuvuvu.”
H?•kon
Ah, years ago I found it quite entertaining to be at conferences and listen to people from different countries spell out their local variety of “www”. It’s one way to learn that www is a name, and if your server already has a name it doesn’t need another.
It stopped being funny about 4 years ago (but I think my favourite “www” would be in Cymraeg…)
media girl
There are little quirky exceptioins. Those True Fresco referrer scripts? They will give you one list of people going to your http://www... site, but if you reload your page without the www they will give you a completely different (and smaller) list. Go figure. I tend to use it online and leave it off in print. I tried saying trip-dub for a while, but nobody knew what the heck I was talking about. So now, talking, I leave it off, too. (But use the www in voiceovers.) I’m usually very consistent with these usages.