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Comment by moehm | Hacker News Reader

Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".

That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.

This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www".

On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.

Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says:

"BURRITO.CONSULTING"

I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..."

but then if i see the same sign

"WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING"

I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."

Yes, 'www.burrito.consulting' looks akward, but most people born after 1960 will recognize it as the URL for a web site.

People outside tech generally don't realise that domain.tld and www.domain.tld are two separate hostnames, and adding www. makes it much more recognizable to the general public.

yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.

Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.

On sites for government we always have lot of confusing emails if we don't also make the www in front of subdomains work:

So for subdomain.burrito.com, we redirect the wwww.subdomain.burrito.com

People are just so used to it.

No that was just idiots being fucking lazy

Lazy? Running without www can actually be a decent amount of work:

1. Avoiding the relatively common pairing of {a host whose IP address changes without warning so you need to CNAME it; a DNS provider that doesn't offer CNAME flattening a.k.a. ALIAS a.k.a. ANAME}.

2. Scoping session cookies so user agents don't also send them to your subdomains.

And maybe even more stuff I'm forgetting.

I think none of http, www or .com actually work anymore for all audiencies. What I see more often is stuff like "<instagram logo> @burrito_catering" or "<facebook logo> burrito_catering".

It is interesting to see the same signs and logos on non-north american businesses where much the same approach has been adopted for GFW-compliant things within China, where a retail store might have some nice glossy logos for alipay, wechat pay, weibo and qq

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