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Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

I understand the article walks through the technical aspects. However, having seen a lot of non-savvy users use Internet, I am firmly with WWW. Probably because of association and all major "established" companies using www, people associate it with strength. I have learned it to be important in similar ways that a .com extension is.

If the site did not have www, most people assumed it is probably made by kids, who do not have www yet. See, most people do not understand that www is not a domain like .com which you have to buy. So for average joe consumer, it signals strength. For an enterprise customer, it probably does too. So unless your product is for savvy users or zen-like designers, I'd stick with www.

A lot of people think that naked domain is cleaner. It is actually not, since the average mind is conditioned to read www.x.com, and you have https://x.com. It's cleaner in the sense that a face is cleaner without a nose.

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>having seen a lot of non-savvy users use Internet, I am firmly with WWW

As an anecdotal counterpoint, at our family Christmas, I mentioned a few different urls, spelling out "www" each time; one of my nieces said "why do you keep saying 'www'", and one of the other kids said "that's how old people find websites." After some discussion, it turned out that nearly everyone over 30 habitually wrote urls with "www" at the front, and everyone under 18 always omitted it.

At least we've mostly gotten away from "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash..."

I heard https mentioned in a spoken url on the radio recently. And they said "that's with secure encryption"

I always thought it was odd when they go with the whole "http://www." voodoo ritual, but then they skip the final slash after the domain.

AFAIK the lack of a path part is allowed in an HTTP URL per RFC2616.

       http_URL = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path [ "?" query ]]

> If the abs_path is not present in the URL, it MUST be given as "/" when used as a Request-URI for a resource (section 5.1.2).

Browsers may differ on whether they auto-fix schemaless URIs, but they're all required to fix path-less URIs. So it's much "safer" to use them.

Or even worse, "h-t-t-p-colon-backslash-backslash..." from people who were used to saying "c-colon-backslash"

Or worse yet still "forward slash forward slash."

How is forward slash worse? At least that's the correct direction.

Because it's a made up term. It's just called "slash."

More like: solidus and reverse solidus!

At least it unambiguously refers to the correct character / as opposed the incorrect character \

its awesome that URL's can have different protocols. althoug most user/apps will asume http#/www

Or worse yet, "h-t-t-p colon reverse-backslash reverse-backslash..."

Wow yeah I bet those kids were not born back when web.mit.edu and www.mit.edu were still different things (plus see e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/19990208005346/http://mit.edu/ ).

Or they just parse the URL differently. One possibility is to treat mit.edu as equivalent to www.mit.edu, and web.mit.edu to www.web.mit.edu. This is how I did it when I was a kid (and knew absolutely nothing about programming etc.)

My anecdote confirms your counterpoint. I too was once ridiculed for spelling out www in a conversation with some millennials. Made me feel old.

here's a weird thing about "www": in the netherlands, many people say the "www" out loud when mentioning a domain name, but then omit the dot after the "www". they do mention the dot before the TLD. so a domain like "www.example.nl" would be pronounced as "wwwexample.nl".

to be clear, this is not something incidental. you hear it in radio and tv commercials. there might be a relation with age, with older people forgetting the "." after "www" more often.

This is interesting, I never realized this is the same in France. Sometimes all the words "dot" are omitted. I will have a walk at the office tomorrow to have people read out loud www.example.fr and www.example.nl. This must be seriously researched :)

10-15 years ago, it was popular to see "www.example.com" everywhere (television ads, etc.). Nowadays, though, I can't think of the last time I saw "www" in ads, printed materials, etc.

I think the younger generation, in particular, is more accustomed to the lack of www.

> If the site did not have www, most people assumed it is probably made by kids, who do not have www yet.

This doesn't make any sense to me. There's literally no correlation between "made by kids" and "doesn't have www", and no reason why anyone would ever make that association. You've provided what appears to be a bullshit justification for a completely unsubstantiated and fairly outlandish claim.

I have trouble believing this to be honest. Any hard evidence?

It's anecdotal. However, it should not be hard to test it out with 10 non-tech friends. I also don't recall having my credit card on file on any website that uses naked domain. That's pure correlation. Which goes on to show how valid any hard evidence on this issue would be.

Performing your own little user study is the best way to take a stance, I believe.

I agree and not sure why you've been downvoted originally. I've also seen plenty of non-tech-savvy users use the internet who seem almost confused if a website isn't 'using www'.

Exactly. We used a naked domain for a while and had to switch because a percentage of people kept getting "worried" about the missing www.

I think if you have a tech target audience this doesn't matter but for general consumers, it's still an issue.

Some browsers hide the www from the URL (even if it's actually there,) so I think customers notice it less.

This.

It also depends on your site's target audience. For a programming site or other I.T technical site it properly wouldn't matter.

For others, as recent as 2014 i still witness the following. A: What was the site address ? B: something.com A: OK. [Start typing www.something.com ]

For the majority, i.e those who dont know HN, and dont know jack about computers, WWW means website. While in recent years this is much less of a problem because Google has become our gateway to Internet and Apps taking over, WWW is still ingrained into their mindset.

And agree on the .com.

>It's cleaner in the sense that a face is cleaner without a nose.

Otoh, our noses (and balls) are ugly as hell. We just used to them during evolution.

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