Hawk Software

Do most people even know what ‘www’ means in a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)?  Is the www prefix really needed on today’s Internet?

I have been on the Internet since its stone age period (the fall of 1993 for you youngsters).  Back then the World Wide Web was just beginning to take off. Heck, Microsoft did not have a web presence yet, not even an FTP server!  Anyone else remember downloading Windows 3.1 driver updates from Microsoft by dialing long distance to Redmond to use their BBS (bulletin board service) by modem? Or later when Windows 95 was released and Microsoft provided updates by CompuServe?  Yes, those were the good old days (NOT!).

Anyway, back then servers for different protocols tended to be physically separate, and using a prefix to designate the type of server( www [HTTP], ftp, gopher, mail [SMTP]) made sense.   And software was separate too: you had an FTP program to access FTP sites, a browser (Mosaic) for HTTP, etc.

But things are different now. Most traffic is HTTP or SMTP, with various multimedia protocols and good old FTP hidden behind URIs.  Many web sites, including this one, no longer use the www prefix.  Sure, you can access this site with the www, but your browser will get a permanent redirect (301) to a URI without the www.  My feeling is that the www is redundant, and just makes the URI longer and harder to remember.  I have no public FTP, or anything else in my domain (yet).

Most Internet users would not even notice whether a URI they click on has the www prefix, or would even notice if the browser was redirected.  To these users the Internet is whatever they access through a browser, or browser enabled software such as RealPlayer.  Most do not even consider e-mail to be the Internet!  So, unless some new protocol comes along to challenge HTTP, I will continue to leave off the redundant www prefix on the sites I manage.