Why has the web not moved on from www.?

[djr33]

I understand that www. may actually be a very helpful part of some websites if they are setup in a way that they need multiple subdomains for various different protocols, etc.
However, I absolutely hate websites that don't load (404) when you omit the www.

Likewise some sites give a 404 when www. is added and without it works. Though actually I think www is a thing of the past and should be phased out (so it gives a 404), it should at least be consistent across various websites.


Aside from people testing this very issue, there is no real reason to visit one or the other if only one works, so perhaps browsers should just automatically forward/check if one fails to see if the other can replace it (add or remove www.).


And again, I do know why this is the case, but it seems like an awkward remnant of a time that www. actually meant something (on all sites, not just the few now that do have a legitimate use for it).


Aside from the general annoyance of this setup, there are also some practical issues, like how cookies may only be valid for one or the other so users must stay within the www. context or they will appear logged out.

[james438]

Maybe it can be removed, but from what I have been reading about the www prefix it appears that the prefix www or its absence tells the browser (usually) that it is to be used to access a web server. The www prefix is the host server name or type. You could have ftp.something, mail.google.com, etc, which would tell the program or browser to access a ftp server or mail server.

You can read more about them at http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/ and the third paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name#Second-level_and_lower_level_domains

Since www is so common it probably could be eliminated easily enough. I also read on another page that many, if not most, web surfers are confused if the www prefix is not used in a web address. I know that was the case for me up until about a month ago or less. I typed in www for just about everything.

[djr33]

Yes, people are confused, so that seems like a good thing to fix.
I realized that mail. and ftp. are useful, but www. seems implied-- what else would the default be?
In theory you might want just a mailserver or something, but can't you just set that up with some other aspect of the server (such as general configuration + no index page)?

This is more a rant than a legitimate question, I admit, but I just find the whole situation very archaic and illogical.

www. is used to the point where it gives no additional information and everyone expects www. and the root to be identical.

[traq]

I think the issue here is that people have come to expect things to work when they leave "www" out, not that it's become useless. It's just as useful as it ever was. The only reason some sites work with or without is that their web hosts (or webmasters (or sometimes, both)) have changed their server configurations (or .htaccess files (or sometimes, both)) to rewrite the incoming requests.

It's all a fault of convenience.

[djr33]

Right, but that's certainly no reason to keep it separate-- who really wants that as the default anyway? If you actually want something else, you could set it up yourself as needed.
www/ is sometimes a main directory on webservers but on others nonexistent-- especially on those servers, I really don't see the point... if there is a root directory why is it default to a subdirectory?

Here's a question, though... what ELSE would they want to have as the main part of the site?

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I think it very easy:
Why does one use "www.foo.com" as a server name? Why not just "foo.com"?
An alias was a better alternative to "pegasus.foo.com" which typically resulted when someone who happened to have a machine called pegasus started to run a web server for foo company. (The www prefix on a computer name also allows one to guess that it was a web server. This allowed early estimates of the numbers of servers, for example.)

[thesource]

Interesting comments from Ashley Friedlein about why Econsultancy dropped the www.

Reasons:

1. "to make our URLs shorter"
2. "it seemed like this might be the way websites were going."

It impacted their search ranking temporarily, so be sure to do it properly!

Read more:

http://econsultancy.com/forums/best-practice/why-did-econsultancy-drop-the-www

and

http://econsultancy.com/forums/best-practice/improving-url-structure-for-seo