WWW Stands For Worthless3

By Daniel Miessler on February 22nd, 2005: Tagged as Technology

Going along with my ongoing fascination with efficiency, I’m going to be breaking my habit of using “www” in front of the domains that don’t require it, i.e. most of them.

For anyone who’s not up to speed, in the URL http://www.cnn.com, the com portion refers to the top-level-domain, which roughly determines what sort of organization the domain is. The cnn portion is the real meat. It’s the domain itself, i.e. the organization. http:// is the protocol used by the browser to reach the resource, but that’s not important here.

The trick is, anything to the left of the domain (in this case cnn) is a hostname. So if you want to further specify within the cnn domain where you want to go, you append a hostname. If they had mail services and you were setting up your email client to work with that account, you’d perhaps enter mail.cnn.com. If they hosted a file transfer service, you may contact ftp.cnn.com, etc.

For serving web pages, however, which is the most commonly offered service online, no hostname is usually needed. It used to be, in the beginning of the Internet, that a special machine named “www” would host the web content, and in order to reach that machine users would have to enter http://www.domain.tld. That’s usually not the case anymore. For most sites, you can just enter http://domain.tld and end up at the web server for the organization.

This is a minor issue, to be sure, but if there’s no reason to type extra stuff, why do it? Here are some sites that allow you to enter just the domain:

http://cnn.com http://slashdot.org http://wired.com http://boingboing.net http://yahoo.com http://google.com http://microsoft.com http://redhat.com http://novell.com http://ibm.com http://hp.com

…just to name a few.

*Note: Some of the sites above actually redirect you to www.domain.tld, but that’s just as good as it not being needed. Either way, it’s not necessary for you to type it.

  • Jason

    An excellent thing, as Douglas Adams pointed out that “double-u, double-u, double-u” is the only abbreviation that takes three times longer to say that the phrase is stands for. However, I hand out URLs all day long on the phone, and I never prepend the www. It never fails–the person on the other end always says, “http-colon-slash-slash-double-u-double-u-double-u?” “Yes,” I say. “Yes…that’s absolutely right.”

    People will do things the long way because it’s what they’re familiar with…they do not like change, even when it’s obviously to their benefit.

  • Jason

    An excellent thing, as Douglas Adams pointed out that “double-u, double-u, double-u” is the only abbreviation that takes three times longer to say that the phrase is stands for. However, I hand out URLs all day long on the phone, and I never prepend the www. It never fails–the person on the other end always says, “http-colon-slash-slash-double-u-double-u-double-u?” “Yes,” I say. “Yes…that’s absolutely right.”

    People will do things the long way because it’s what they’re familiar with…they do not like change, even when it’s obviously to their benefit.

  • Brad Wolfe

    in the line of effiiency. If you mean effiiency on your part, in typing etc., i ALWAYS enter addresses that are prepended with “www.” and appened with “.com” as the body followed by ctrl+enter. You should try this. so, in the address bar, you would type wired then hit ctrl+enter and then http://www.wired.com appears in the address bar. All that I can figure w/o more research is that this combination of key works in win 2000 and up, mozilla, and IE, and only with http://www.___.com addys. I may play w/ it some more to give you more info if you want it. Let me know if you already do this regularly so that I may attack myself appropriately.

  • Brad Wolfe

    in the line of effiiency. If you mean effiiency on your part, in typing etc., i ALWAYS enter addresses that are prepended with “www.” and appened with “.com” as the body followed by ctrl+enter. You should try this. so, in the address bar, you would type wired then hit ctrl+enter and then http://www.wired.com appears in the address bar. All that I can figure w/o more research is that this combination of key works in win 2000 and up, mozilla, and IE, and only with http://www.___.com addys. I may play w/ it some more to give you more info if you want it. Let me know if you already do this regularly so that I may attack myself appropriately.

  • daniel

    Actually, I believe that just typing the body itself will do the trick; I don’t think we need to do the protocol or the TLD – at least for .com domains. It could get a bit tricky when a .com exists and you want to go to the .org, but these are fairly rare during a given day (for me anyway).

    Hmm, so I wonder if I should edit my post … yeah, I think I will.

  • daniel

    Actually, I believe that just typing the body itself will do the trick; I don’t think we need to do the protocol or the TLD – at least for .com domains. It could get a bit tricky when a .com exists and you want to go to the .org, but these are fairly rare during a given day (for me anyway).

    Hmm, so I wonder if I should edit my post … yeah, I think I will.


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