![](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2188\/2299435232_f7a5d9cca6_m.jpg\")
There was a time when the web wasn’t the only game in town.\u00a0 There were just as many Gopher, FTP and News (NNTP) sites as there were\u00a0web sites.\u00a0 To distinguish web pages from other technologies, the familiar “www” was added as a prefix to the domain names.<\/p>\n
Then everything got a web page.\u00a0 There were so many web pages that every other protocol virtually disappeared.\u00a0 Today getting on the Internet usually means getting on the web.\u00a0 I have heard many people ask, “do we have web access”, instead of asking if we have “Internet” access.<\/p>\n
It also means that most people by default start every web address with “www” even though we don’t necessarily have to.\u00a0 Today I told someone about my del.icio.us links and he typed<\/p>\n
www.del<\/a><\/p>\n before I could stop him.<\/p>\n I am a big fan of shortcuts and typing<\/p>\n http:\/\/findlay.edu<\/a><\/p>\n instead of<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.findlay.edu<\/a><\/p>\n is a savings of four keystrokes.\u00a0 More importantly,<\/p>\n http:\/\/mail.findlay.edu<\/a><\/p>\n will take you to UF’s web based email while<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.mail.findlay.edu<\/a><\/p>\n will take you nowhere.<\/p>\n Here is my point.\u00a0 We should stop using “www” as much as possible. The owner of a domain name decides what “names” are matched to the servers.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is all set up in the site’s DNS<\/a>.<\/p>\n DNS is that magical system that takes the names we humans can remember and associates them with the numbers that computers use.\u00a0 Think of DNS as a phonebook for Internet.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Just like the phone system, several different names can be connected to one phone number.\u00a0 You may have your name as well as your spouse’s name in the phone book.\u00a0 If you have a home business, that name might be “mapped” to the same phone number.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have started to drop the “www” on as many references to URLs as possible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I hope it happens sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was a time when the web wasn’t the only game in town.\u00a0 There were just as many Gopher, FTP and News (NNTP) sites as there were\u00a0web sites.\u00a0 To distinguish web pages from other technologies, the familiar “www” was added … Continue reading