Here we are, in 2010, and I’m still seeing ads and other links to websites that include the “www.” at the start of the web address. Now, thankfully, most people have gotten the message already that there’s no need for the “http://” in front of a URL, but I am still baffled as to why we’re still hanging on to the “www.” part, which is about as useful to a web site as the appendix is to the human body.

The worst part of it all is that “www.” was never really necessary in the first place. Back in the early- to mid-1990s, when the Web was just starting to take off, we were all using relatively simple web browsers. Even so, I remember that the first browser I used heavily, Netscape 1.1, would automatically fill in the “http://” protocol if you didn’t specify it. That was an obvious call, because hey, you were using a web browser, so the odds were pretty good that you were going to a web site if you didn’t tell the browser otherwise, so the of course the browser should go ahead and fill in the protocol.

The “www.” part of a web address is actually a subdomain of the main domain, which was supposed to help separate the web server (the part of the server accessible via HTTP) from other protocols, like Gopher, FTP, email and the like. However, if you tried to connect to servers using HTTP, the servers were almost entirely capable of noticing what protocol or port was being used and answering correctly. Unfortunately, no one at the time had any idea that the Web would become one of the most transcendent ways of sharing information, ever, so sysadmins everywhere just gave the Web server a subdomain (e.g., www.somesite.com) as they did with, say, mail servers (e.g., mail.somesite.com).

Fast forward fifteen years and the Web is not only still around, but it’s going strong and still growing…which is more than anyone can say for poor old Gopher. However, we’ve been stuck with “www.” add-on, even though web servers are smart enough to perform a simple forward if it’s been set up.

It’s time to drop the “www.” from our domains. Don’t worry, though; your sysadmin can set up a simple forward so that if people still type in the “www.”, they’ll just get shown to the right URL.

There are several reasons I’m advocating this:

1. There’s no need for the “www.” part. As I said above, it’s completely vestigial in terms of the Internet. There’s virtually no chance any more that someone’s coming to your site with Gopher.
2. Less is more. Leaving off the “www.” gives you four characters back and these days—with social networking sites like Twitter being as popular as they are—the shorter your URL is, the easier it is for people to remember it and pass it along.
3. It looks better. Okay, this is a personal reason, but I happen to think that a shorter, more readable URL looks a lot better on an advertisement than one with the “www.” included. Whenever I see an ad with it still included, I feel like the company behind it doesn’t quite get the Internet. (Embarassingly, when Chicago Public Library started their “Not What You Think” ad campaign and had ads all over the city referring people to “chipublib.org”, they discovered that their web server was not set up to handle automatic redirects from chipublib.org to www.chipublib.org.)
4. It’ll do better in search engines. Google, for example, ranks http://somesite.com/ slightly higher than http://www.somesite.com/.

So brush up on your .htaccess terminology and drop the useless “www.” from your domains.