Domain name by any other name

There was a time when the web wasn’t the only game in town.  There were just as many Gopher, FTP and News (NNTP) sites as there were web sites.  To distinguish web pages from other technologies, the familiar “www” was added as a prefix to the domain names.

Then everything got a web page.  There were so many web pages that every other protocol virtually disappeared.  Today getting on the Internet usually means getting on the web.  I have heard many people ask, “do we have web access”, instead of asking if we have “Internet” access.

It also means that most people by default start every web address with “www” even though we don’t necessarily have to.  Today I told someone about my del.icio.us links and he typed

www.del

before I could stop him.

I am a big fan of shortcuts and typing

http://findlay.edu

instead of

http://www.findlay.edu

is a savings of four keystrokes.  More importantly,

http://mail.findlay.edu

will take you to UF’s web based email while

http://www.mail.findlay.edu

will take you nowhere.

Here is my point.  We should stop using “www” as much as possible. The owner of a domain name decides what “names” are matched to the servers.  It has become normal for domain name owners to map both the “www” prefix and the “no prefix at all” URLs to the web server.  It is all set up in the site’s DNS.

DNS is that magical system that takes the names we humans can remember and associates them with the numbers that computers use.  Think of DNS as a phonebook for Internet.  It looks up the names and dials the numbers for us so that we don’t have to remember all those numbers… just the names of the people we want to call.

Just like the phone system, several different names can be connected to one phone number.  You may have your name as well as your spouse’s name in the phone book.  If you have a home business, that name might be “mapped” to the same phone number. 

I have started to drop the “www” on as many references to URLs as possible.  It will take some time, but eventually we will all stop typing “www” as the default prefix to any web address we put into our browsers.  I hope it happens sooner rather than later.