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No need for 'WWW'
http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=202		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  StuartA [ Sun Oct 19, 2008 2:46 pm ]
Post subject:  No need for 'WWW'
www.retrosoftware.co.uk works but not retrosoftware.co.uk this can lead to a bit of confusion typing in the 2nd one and not getting the site - it's a matter of configuring the webserver to like both.
Author:  Samwise [ Sun Oct 19, 2008 3:52 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
We don't have direct access to the webserver or DNS configuration and, unless there's a groundswell of disapproval, I don't see much point bothering our generous host with this request - we've never advertised the site as anything other than www.retrosoftware.co.uk.

If you use Firefox and visit the site fairly regularly, you'll probably find typing "re" in the location bar and hitting Enter will get you to the site even quicker, anyway.

Sam.
Author:  StuartA [ Sun Oct 19, 2008 5:25 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
No problem (although I do agree with the people who say the "www" suffix is obsolete). Just confused me when I wanted to come here on a friends computer the other day - thought I had the wrong address and had to go find it from stairwaytohell again.
Author:  Samwise [ Mon Oct 20, 2008 12:01 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
StuartA wrote:
(although I do agree with the people who say the "www" suffix is obsolete)

What a bizarrely curious notion.

Sam.
Author:  FrancisL [ Mon Oct 20, 2008 12:05 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
Although some websites and browsers do accept URLs without the www prefix I could see things getting confusing if it was abandoned altogether.

Kind regards,

Francis.
Author:  RichTW [ Mon Oct 20, 2008 12:52 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
Samwise wrote:
What a bizarrely curious notion.

Really? I find that a curious notion! ;)

I don't think the www prefix adds anything at all. What else is bbc.co.uk? If you're typing it into a web browser, you're looking for a website. There's no ambiguity, and I don't think you need www to qualify it further - it just makes it more cumbersome to say!

These days, I see websites advertised nearly always without 'www.' - I just figured it was a bit of nomenclature that was being phased out.

Anyway, regarding the site name, I couldn't care less - I've got it bookmarked! :lol:
Author:  FrancisL [ Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:13 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
As someone that uses ftp it is slightly easier (in my opinion) to use www.site.com and ftp.site.com to differentiate between them rather than having to add the http:// and ftp:// prefixes.

Using just site.com is rather ambiguous.

Kind regards,

Francis.

P.S. Another argument for the prefix I've just noticed is that sites like this auto-highlight www addresses as links. :)
Author:  Samwise [ Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:16 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
Why should a web server be assumed to take priority over any other services that might be running? The WWW != The Internet.

Sam.

P.S. And the BBC is hardly what I'd use as an example of good practice - try connecting to news.bbc.co.uk with a newsreader!
Author:  RichTW [ Tue Oct 21, 2008 8:40 am ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
Yeah, well that's fair comment... I guess we see it from totally different angles, as my internet use rarely goes even as far as ftp, whilst you're one of these all-powerful sysadmin god-types ;)

I guess all I was trying to say is that, if you visit the website of just about any well-known company, their nameserver* is configured to redirect the base domain to the www-prefixed one - presumably because it's assumed that most users are likely to want to access the website over any other service.

Then, out of curiosity, I visited a few other institutions - some universities and other places of academia, government domains etc - and found that many more require the www prefix to access their website.

So, uhmmm, yeah, I rescind my previous comments :)

* I may be talking bobbins here
Author:  Samwise [ Tue Oct 21, 2008 1:18 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
RichTW wrote:
Yeah, well that's fair comment... I guess we see it from totally different angles, as my internet use rarely goes even as far as ftp,

I've always considered IRC to be the real internet frontier. That's where all the sex, violence, viruses etc. are just a channel away from a load of genuinely nice ppl. I definitely learned a lot more about the internet when I started hanging out there, years back.

RichTW wrote:
whilst you're one of these all-powerful sysadmin god-types ;)

hahaha. no, I'm just marginally less lazy than DaveM when it comes to poking the right things that have broken. :)

RichTW wrote:
I guess all I was trying to say is that, if you visit the website of just about any well-known company, their nameserver* is configured to redirect the base domain to the www-prefixed one - presumably because it's assumed that most users are likely to want to access the website over any other service.

Indeed - I'd suggest that that practice really began as a marketing convenience, as ppl wanted to make their URLs as small as possible. And, that's fine, you're right that the website is usually the primary server (certainly in our case) - but I don't think that means it should necessarily replace the www. option completely. In our case, I'm only not going out of our way to do it, because our hosting guys do a /lot/ for us already - so I think it fair to only bother them when we have essential stuff that needs doing. In practice, some webapps also need to know what URL is being used in their config, so were I to get it done I'd be asking for them to make retrosoftware.co.uk a CNAME for www.retrosoftware.co.uk in the DNS rather than the webserver config, but I really don't see a major need for it atm.

RichTW wrote:
Then, out of curiosity, I visited a few other institutions - some universities and other places of academia, government domains etc - and found that many more require the www prefix to access their website.

So, uhmmm, yeah, I rescind my previous comments :)

Good practice would be to redirect to the www version, I feel. Typing google.co.uk, for instance, will load the www.google.co.uk site. That's how we'd do it, if I were to bother our hosters.

RichTW wrote:
* I may be talking bobbins here

It can be done either by DNS or the webserver but the former is more common, so you're most likely correct in the majority of cases.

Sam.
Author:  SteveO [ Wed Oct 29, 2008 10:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: No need for 'WWW'
Samwise wrote:
I've always considered IRC to be the real Internet frontier. That's where all the sex, violence, viruses etc. are just a channel away from a load of genuinely nice ppl. I definitely learned a lot more about the Internet when I started hanging out there, years back.
I'd kind of forgotten all about IRC. I first tried that with some cheap software (about a tenner rings a bell) on my Acorn A3000 umpteen years ago (before I even had a home PC). It was all the rage back then, I got the software after Acorn user or micro User were going on about IRC, and it seemed in the tech news a lot.

I fired up the machine, installed it, created a nick, accidentally joined some channel or other and someone started chatting within seconds. Then after I said I'd only just started using it and didn't really know what I was doing promptly disappeared ! I never started the software up again ! I think I didn't see the point in just online chatting to strangers. Probably lots more to it but never delved deeper ! I'm probably just an anti-social miss-fit.... well I am a coder !
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