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Comment by edmccard | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.)

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..."

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 :)

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