Should We Deprecate WWW? 9 of the World's Top 10 Websites Don't Seem To Think So

#1

Post by rapidstuff » Mon, Feb 09, 2009, 3:27 AM UTC

Is this worth emulating? 9 of the top 10 largest websites in the world default to www.domain.com.

Should We Deprecate WWW? 9 of the World's Top 10 Websites Don't Seem To Think So
marketingly.com

Re: Should We Deprecate WWW? 9 of the World's Top 10 Websites Don't Seem To Think So

#2

Post by amoeba » Mon, Feb 09, 2009, 5:00 AM UTC

The use of www is incongruous with the idea that the text before your domain name is a subdomain. The URL format I expect is (protocol)://[credentials@][subdomain].(domain) and www breaks this.

Re: Should We Deprecate WWW? 9 of the World's Top 10 Websites Don't Seem To Think So

#3

Post by alain94040 » Mon, Feb 09, 2009, 5:43 AM UTC

amoeba wrote: post #2

The use of www is incongruous with the idea that the text before your domain name is a subdomain. The URL format I expect is (protocol)://[credentials@][subdomain].(domain) and www breaks this.

I don't think it breaks the URL format. In your domain, you could presumably have plenty of services, one of them being a web server, handled by a machine on the "www" subdomain. In practice, the only service anyone cares about is the web and so "www." has become redundant.

I'm all for getting rid of the "www" prefix. But I'm sure someone at Google researched it and found that 1% of older consumers are scared when they don't see the magic three letters. 1% means $100M in lost revenue, so the www stays.

For now.