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akerl_

For the opposite case:

http://no-www.org/

View on HN

And for the humorous case:

http://www.www.extra-www.org

OK, but that doesn't address any of the issues presented in the Yes WWW article posted here. I don't even see an argument against WWW other than convenience or aesthetics.

If course it doesn't address any of the issues, because the no-www page was created in 2003, while the yes-www page was created in 2005.

Websites can be updated. Some people even update their blog posts, despite their intrinsically temporary nature.

The issues in that article are basically that "such provider can't support the usual DNS configuration", and that "you'll either send cookies[1] to get static data, or will have to spend $20 more every year", and that both of those will become a problem when your site gets huge.

Well, if you get a huge site, and are still using those providers, or can't spare an extra $20 yearly, well, you have some much larger problem than the lack of "www" prefix.

Also, having an ugly URL just because one day you may become big and need it is a fool's errand. Use the pretty one, and when that day comes, change it. It's a one line change in the server settings, and there is no penalty on links, search ranking, or anything else.

[1] Ignore that in most cases those cookies don't consume any extra bandwidth. Network communication is normally padded to multiples of some relatively big size, and requests for static data is quite small. If you use very large cookies, then yes, maybe you should think about spending those $20, or adding the "www" once your site grows.

Does that site actually make a case or do they just not like the "www" being there?

Yes.

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the 'http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

that's great, mail servers have an MX record, rather than relying on an A record for the base domain to provide only one service, which can cause confusion with other services.

> Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain?

You mean host. www is a host in example.com. Protocol indicator (http/https) and host name (www, mail, bob) have nothing to do with each other.

You don't have to do @host.example.com if there is a special DNS record for SMTP to indicate where to actually send mail, without it you do have to do host.example.com.

> automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80

What HTTP server? if the URL is www.example.com we connect to the server named www, it could be named bob if we wanted. Without the host name given you have to create a catchall to tell clients to send ALL traffic without a hostname to.

The comparison between protocols is really stupid.

That's absolutely not how it works. Firstly, "www" is a subdomain of "example.com". The subdomain could match the hostname of the server that hosts it, but that's rarely the case (there can be multiple servers behind a load-balancer, for example). Secondly, you don't have to create a wildcard record for "example.com" to work. You just have to add an A record for it (just like you would do for any subdomain thereof).

And if any web browser supported SRV records to do this properly, we wouldn't have an issue. You don't have to use mail.domain.com because MX records were created to solve this exact issue for mail servers. SRV records were a general purpose solution to the same problem.

Their argument seems only to be that with the https?:// protocol prefix in the URI, the 'www' is redundant. No other arguments than 'time consuming' is presented.

Even their FAQ doesn't answer why they dislike 'www' other than being seemingly redundant. I personally prefer without www on my websites, and my cache server is set up to ignore cookies on static content.

Yes but your clients probably are still sending them to you.

It sounds like both sites are fine with websites that redirect to www.

"However, any site that takes in traffic one way or the other on both the www host and the bare domain are acceptable here."

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