WWW – dep·re·cate (dep’ri-kat’)

Look! – No WWW on this site. Why?

In order to answer this question, we must first recall the definition of WWW:

World Wide Web:
n. Abbr. WWW

  1. The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system.
  2. n : a collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol.

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

One other thing, it’s a SEO dirty little secrety, having www and a non.www page splits page rank, either make everything point toward www or remove it using your httaccess and watch your SEO improve.

4 Responses to “WWW – dep·re·cate (dep’ri-kat’)”

  1. Goplat

    “Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com.”

    Bad analogy. Mail servers are resolved through a special DNS query type (MX). When you send mail to someone@yahoo.com it does NOT go to the server yahoo.com, but actually to one of four servers named mxN.mail.yahoo.com.

    The Web may at the moment be the biggest use of the internet where you type in server names, but it is hardly the only one. Why should it get special treatment?

  2. B10m

    This is old news … http://no-www.org/

  3. psycomut

    all my dns for my domains point to the server. no mail. or pop. or www. same box, 1 name. i really donot like going to a site to find i needed “www”. sign of a lazy dns admin who does not link the root name to main page.

  4. Chris Stormer

    True, but it never hurts to spread the word. My interest has come over the past few weeks as I moved this specific blog over from www, it simply doesn’t have a negative effect. As for the no-www.org, great site. I would also recommend checking out the plug-in for wordpress that makes it easy to make your wordpress blog no-www

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