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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

You're missing jwr's point. He's arguing that this is harmful for users, especially the ones who don't know what the words mean.

If I were solving this, I'd instead push to eliminate "www" altogether, not sweep it under the rug. It was useful circa 1996, when users might plausibly be using something other than the WWW with a browser. But it has become entirely vestigial.

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Why not drop .com then as well? Most sites are on .com domains after all.

It is exactly the same issue.

A domain is a domain. Google is arbitrarily dictating your CNAME from the user's perspective.

What if you don't serve your site off of mysite.com is google going to automatically try again at www.mysite.com?

What if you have distinct content at both domains?

This decision is stupid.

It's not the same issue at all, in that domains with different suffixes are controlled by different people while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people.

If you have an example of somebody who needs to serve different web content for foo.com and www.foo.com, I look forward to seeing it. But I've never seen one, and when I've seen it happen accidentally it's due to idiocy.

> while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people

Sometimes. Far from always.

In some environments, `www` may be under an entirely different administrative domain, with lesser authority than the top level domain which is delegating web services to the `www` group by way of creating a dns record and/or adding an http(s) redirect to the parent domain.

Having some string values arbitrarily considered trivial is dangerous.

See: lbl.gov has address 128.3.41.146 vs www.lbl.gov has address 35.196.135.136

The root domain points to hosts at the lab. The subdomain has been delegated off to Google.

Isn't that simply due to internal politics? Whoever owns foo.com might delegate www.foo.com to someone else, but they ultimately control both.

Either way, www.example.com and example.com can differ in terms of IP address, underlying hardware, actual website content, and probably other things I don’t know. They are different URLs. It seems problematic to assume they are the same.

Not at all. People already assume they are the same. And they have for 20 years. Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs. Anybody clueful redirects one to the other. The only reason they're separate is that a) the web wasn't dominant when it was introduced, and b) technology of the time made it hard to manage traffic in ways we can now.

> Nobody reasonable serves up different content on the two URLs.

The third and ninth comments in the linked bug present real world examples of this behavior.

The 9th comment is explicitly described as "bad results"; it's about somebody who doesn't have a redirect. So that for me is in the "unreasonable" category.

The 3rd is about pool.ntp.org, which is a random ntp server, and which shouldn't be serving up web content. They did happen to pick www.pool.ntp.org as the URL for the docs on the NTP Pool Project, but if "www" never was a thing, the would have happily picked something else. E.g. poolproject.ntp.org or ntp.org/pool/ would have been fine.

It's due to different groups controlling different parts of the infrastructure, allowing for separation of privilege -- and is the whole reason www even existed to begin with.

Often these separate groups aren't part of the same organization. They're a different organization or contractor paid to maintain a web presence.

Yes, but those are decisions made by whoever controls foo.com. This may not be a good decision by Google, but I don't think they should be held responsible for a decision that was made by whoever controls foo.com.

This is completely backwards, because Google just made this decision _now_!

This may be true for LBL, but it's not necessarily so. They don't serve different content, and I don't see anything running on lbl.gov that couldn't be handled.

These string values are already considered equivalent, which is why Chrome is making this change, and why every reasonable site has one redirect to the other.

I realize it is an important distinction, I'm glad you do as well.

Just as ftp.mysite.com is not mysite.com and mysite.com in not mysite.io and http://mysite.com is not https://mysite.com. You get the point.

They are all different and important in my opinion. Any argument that hiding the "www." part makes it easier for the user is equally applicable (and wrong) to ".com"

You can keep repeating your point, but if you want to convince me, you'll have to actually address my demonstration that the two are in fact not equal in practice.

From the bug report that started this thread:

http://www.ntppool.org is not http://pool.ntp.org

and

https://citibank.com.sg is not https://www.citibank.com.sg

and

https://m.tumblr.com/ is not https://www.tumblr.com/

Yet Google makes them all appear to be the same.

There are lots of other odd filtering behaviors in the issue if you want to check out the comments

For example, should:

www.www.www.subdomain.www.www.www.domain.com show as subdomain.domain.com

How is that right?

How does making those two destinations appear to be the same thing make the user "safer" under any stretch of the imagination?

I'm not arguing for Chrome's implementation. I'm saying we should do the more useful but harder thing of just not using "www" as a thing in browser URLs. They have correctly identified it as redundant, but instead tried to fix it by being too clever.

As I mention elsewhere, the first two are bad examples. (In fact. ntppool.org and www.ntppool.org are the same thing.) The third is a hack from the era where responsive design, browser sniffing, and polyfills didn't exist. It should probably die too, but doesn't have to here. The m.tumblr.com name is distinct from tumblr.com and is of the form I think better. Note that they didn't use www.m.tumblr.com.

> domains with different suffixes are controlled by different people while foo.com and www.foo.com are controlled by the same people.

This happen fairly often in universities and some other organizations that can have convoluted structure.

Yes, why not drop URL's altogether then? Why display such "technical" things for the plebes?

Sure, "I'm feeling lucky!" should suffice /s

> Most sites are on .com domains after all.

Most sites in English, and even that is doubtful.

There's a full world out there of people and businesses using ccTLD like .fr, .nl, .co.uk, .hr, .rs, .es, .jp...

With "only" 46.5% of all domains being ".com" I guess you are technically correct. When the next highest TDL (.org) rings in at only 5.1%, I think we can agree the the overwhelming majority of sites are based on .com.

Of the TDL you mention the top one is .jp at less than 2%. If you remove the qualifier under the .uk TLD you get an additional 2%. The rest don't make the chart.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265677/number-of-interne...

It's actually very useful for isolating access to the root of the domain. Say for instance you use a third-party SaaS/CMS to host your website and have other services on other subdomains. If it's hosted on the root of the domain it had more power than if it's on a subdomain.

> If I were solving this, I'd instead push to eliminate "www" altogether, not sweep it under the rug. It was useful circa 1996, when users might plausibly be using something other than the WWW with a browser.

No, it was useful when abstracting machine identity from domain names such that there was a many-to-many relationship was less common, so “www” was the most specific domain name element for the server being accessed. (And a system that needed more than one server might have a homepage on “www”, and various subsites and apps on “www1”, “www2”, etc.)

OTOH, there may be places that still allocate servers that way for simplicity.

As I recall, there are some reasonable dns-related reasons that one might prefer www (or any subdomain) to the bare name.

Modern solution to these issues is having SRV record on appropriate protocol sub-domain which AFAIK (and somewhat surprisingly) is honored by most modern browsers.

Do you have more information about this?

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/dns-srv-record-use-by-clients.html

Browsers don't use SRV records for HTTP. With them one wouldn't need www subdomain CNAME hacks.

How can you eliminate "www" altogether? It's just a subdomain like any other now

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