Poll on pronouncing URLs

[pne]

[Poll #423892]

Comments

[purple-pen.livejournal.com]

It constantly blows my mind that 'www' must be the only acronym which takes longer to say that the thing it is short for.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I say the 'dot', sometimes not. Embrace the power of the tickybox...

[pleiades829.livejournal.com]

For the "www" I tend to elide the vowel at the end, so it's more of a "dub^y dub^y dubya." And if I'm speaking with someone somewhat knowledgable, I won't even say it.

Same for "http://". Usually omitted. If I'm reading off a URL and feel the need to include it, I'll just pronounce the "http" part, and if it's someone who really needs help (ah, tech support) I'll pronounce the "://" part too. I picked the first option since that's usually the situation I'm in.

[timwi.livejournal.com]

I had to laugh at "wuh wuh wuh" and "huttup". :-D ... Shame you didn't also put in "submit dot bummle".

I didn't take your poll because my answers depend on context. Obviously, when I speak to Germans I say "vé vé vé", and "Punkt" instead of "dot", even with an obviously English-based URL like "livejournal.com". With English speakers, I feel kind of forced to say the unwieldy "double-you double-you double-you". My dad likes to say "triple-double-you". (I'm still waiting for someone to seriously suggest "hexuple-you".)

In my mind, however, I have my own weird set of pronunciations that I never really pronounce out loud. The @ sign, for example, is "v" [v] (originally from Russian в). A single slash is "slash", but "http://" is "há té té pé ding ding". In programming (especially in Delphi because I've been doing a lot of Pascal as a child) I have many many more of these.

[timwi.livejournal.com]

I've thought about this some more, and I've come to realise that the more recently I first encountered something, the less likely I am to have a pronunciation for it at all. In Perl, there are loads of things (like "->" or "=>" or "::" or "$_" etc.) for which I have never thought up a pronunciation. I guess this means that I think differently (more abstractly?) now than I did when I was young.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I remember back when everyone used to pronounce email addresses as "foo, and then the commercial at-sign, bar dot com"...

[robnorth.livejournal.com]

There's some goomba who's had some kind of helpful-how-to-use-a-computer show on regional public TV networks here in Canuckistan (e.g. Knowledge Network in BC, Access in Alberta) who's been pushing "woo-woo-woo" (for www) for years. I have yet to hear anyone other than him use that. Thank heavens.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Good point.

I also realised at one point that I don't have a name for $_ in Perl; I "read" it when I'm reading someone else's code (e.g. to type it in somewhere else) but I don't have a vocalisation for it.

[diffrentcolours]

$_ tends to translate as "thing" in my brane.

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I find this too - I see the signs, but don't sound them in my brain - they're just things that don't have names. Well, I suppose they have names (such as "dollar underscore", but I don't use them, they're just stored as images instead of words.

[me-and.livejournal.com]

I ought to tell people off for assuming "www", it being outdated (http://no-www.org/) and all, but I just can't be bothered. :P

I think you're getting friended. I spotted you on the support forums, and the name tag-line hooked me in…

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.)

I think you're getting friended. I spotted you on the support forums, and the name tag-line hooked me in…

Welcome! Most of my entries are public, so you're not missing much.

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.