Domain name by any other name
There was a time when the web wasn’t the only game in town. There were just as many Gopher, FTP and News (NNTP) sites as there were web sites. To distinguish web pages from other technologies, the familiar “www” was added as a prefix to the domain names.
Then everything got a web page. There were so many web pages that every other protocol virtually disappeared. Today getting on the Internet usually means getting on the web. I have heard many people ask, “do we have web access”, instead of asking if we have “Internet” access.
It also means that most people by default start every web address with “www” even though we don’t necessarily have to. Today I told someone about my del.icio.us links and he typed
before I could stop him.
I am a big fan of shortcuts and typing
instead of
is a savings of four keystrokes. More importantly,
will take you to UF’s web based email while
will take you nowhere.
Here is my point. We should stop using “www” as much as possible. The owner of a domain name decides what “names” are matched to the servers. It has become normal for domain name owners to map both the “www” prefix and the “no prefix at all” URLs to the web server. It is all set up in the site’s DNS.
DNS is that magical system that takes the names we humans can remember and associates them with the numbers that computers use. Think of DNS as a phonebook for Internet. It looks up the names and dials the numbers for us so that we don’t have to remember all those numbers… just the names of the people we want to call.
Just like the phone system, several different names can be connected to one phone number. You may have your name as well as your spouse’s name in the phone book. If you have a home business, that name might be “mapped” to the same phone number.
I have started to drop the “www” on as many references to URLs as possible. It will take some time, but eventually we will all stop typing “www” as the default prefix to any web address we put into our browsers. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:10 am
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February 29th, 2008 at 12:27 am
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 12:52 am
[...] name by any other name domainnamer wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe owner of a domain name decides [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 12:54 am
[...] here: Domain study by some another name Posted in Domains on Feb 28th, 2008, 10:46 [...]
March 4th, 2008 at 11:17 am
But why, then, do you put the protocol in? In almost all cases, the browser will figure out the protocol and stick it in for you. So
findlay.edu
is a savings of six keystrokes over
http://findlay.edu
and a whopping 10 keystrokes (that’s 48%) over the full
http://www.findlay.edu
In those rare occasions when you’re using a different protocol in the URL, you can just specify it (ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu). But www ought to be the default.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:30 am
I only inserted the http:// so it was clear I was writing about a URL. You are certainly correct about the seven letter typing short-cut.
Of course, if you look back at Efficiency Tip #6:
http://www.trustyetc.com/trustyblog/2007/04/28/efficiency-tip-6-ctrl-enter/
there is a URL short-cut that can save you FIFTEEN keystrokes.
July 5th, 2008 at 7:22 am
[...] Full article: http://www.trustyetc.com [...]