Poll on pronouncing URLs

[pne]

[Poll #423892]

Comments

To WWW or not to WWW

[pne.livejournal.com]

I ought to tell people off for assuming "www", it being outdated and all

I disagree -- and also with the statement on that website (http://no-www.org/) that "www" in Internet hostnames is a "subdomain". I call it a "hostname": it's host "www" in the "livejournal.com" (for example) domain, just like a company server might be, say, gandalf.example.com: host "gandalf" in domain "example.com".

I find it weird to go to http://example.com/, since to my mind, a domain has SOA, NS, and MX entries, but no A or CNAME entries -- I associate A entries with *hosts*, not *domains*, and for me, a host is beneath a domain.

I know that it works, but it still feels kind of icky to me.

Now, whether the host is called www or something else (e.g. MIT's website was called web.mit.edu for a long time, and www.mit.edu, which came later, was some student-run machine) is not so important, though www is a kind of quasi-standard for "the name of the machine running the web server for a given (sub)domain".

The comparison with email not going to user@mail.example.com is also not valid IMO, since mail is looked up by MX record, not by A record (though as a fallback, A will usually be used if no MX record is found).

Now, if we have a SVC (I think it was) record saying that for HTTP requests to example.com, www.example.com is to be used, then fine, but that's not widespread at all in domains and I think browsers probably don't support it anyway, so you can't compare email and HTTP.

*shrugs* I'll use www, you can drop it if the site allows it. Just saying. (Oh, and "class C no-www" sites annoy me slightly. simon-cozens.org is an example.)

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Re: To WWW or not to WWW

[me-and.livejournal.com]

Erm. What I understand of that makes sense, I think. I'm not quite geeky enough to properly understand all the acronyms...

I think it depends where you look at it from - the person looking after the servers may prefer to have everything named as standard, while an end user never sees the servers, and just sees a site that works or doesn't work, so to them it makes sense.

But yes, sites that don't allow www are annoying.