Www. is deprecated - should it be?

The main problem with the plain "no www" record is that there is much less you can do with it in DNS. Most especially you can't make it a CNAME nor can you delegate the DNS to somebody else without delegating the whole domain.<p>With a www.example.com I can just make www a CNAME to a cloud or CDN vendor. With plain example.com I have to delegate DNS for my whole domain to that vendor (assuming they do that service) or use a A-record and go with one of the 3 anycast CDN's in the world.<p>Same if I want to use a GSLB service. I can just make it a CNAME or put in a NS record for my www.example.com . For example.com I'd have to run GSLB myself or put my whole domain under control of the external vendor.<p>So all work's domains have the smart stuff on www.example.com and the <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">http://example.com</a> is just a 301 to the www version.

I don't care much either way, except that I see some cases where using a 'www' hostname can be advantageous. In television and commercials, it's a useful marker that what being listed refers to a website. To the layman who is not familiar with all TLDs, 'example.nu' may be bogus, while 'www.example.nu' is immediately recognizable as referring to a website.<p>My take: 'www' helps in disambiguation, and sure is nicer than having to prefix all names with '<a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a>.

Every time I enter a www-only-site without the <i>www</i> prefix and see an error page, I think <i>incompetent idiots</i> for a brief period before I add the www

<i>"Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required."</i><p>Sure, email is like this thanks to MX records. We could have the same for web servers by using SRV records ("_http._tcp.example.net" pointing at your "real" web server[s]) but I have no idea how many browsers support looking up SRV before A.

The people running this website need to get out of the lab and into the real world. www. is certainly not "deprecated", and declaring it to be so from your ivory tower doesn't change that.<p>The fact is that it's not important at all. There are plenty of real problems to solve, and interesting questions to ask.

Too bad that google app engine seems to only allow subdomains, so www seems the only sane choice for now. Or have they fixed that by now?

I love this one, listed as a "competitor": <a href="http://www.www.extra-www.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.www.extra-www.org/</a>

Yes, should be, just because "double-u-double-u-double-u" takes a ridiculously long time to vocalize.

I think www can be useful offline. We here all recognize domain.tld as a website, but I suspect that www.domain.tld is more recognizable to non-technical folks. "Visit www.domain.tld for more information." etc.

What would happen to wildcard SSL certs which depend on the main site being at www.example.com as opposed to example.com which a wildcard cert does not match?<p>Likewise with restricted cookies, most browsers fail to allow you to restrict a cookie to example.com alone (this restricts to all subdomains also). Restricting to www.example.com gets around this problem.<p>These complaints seem unfounded, the real problem is people not using permanent redirects on example.com to www.example.com

I wrote up a few pros and cons on using www a while ago. Basically I think only using the TLD is more pure but in the long run you lose less than you might gain by dividing services on subdomains. Whatever that subdomain may be.<p><a href="http://vvv.tobiassjosten.net/internet/using-www-for-your-domain" rel="nofollow">http://vvv.tobiassjosten.net/internet/using-www-for-your-dom...</a>

<i>Another benefit of hosting static components on a cookie-free domain is that some proxies might refuse to cache the components that are requested with cookies. On a related note, if you wonder if you should use example.org or www.example.org for your home page, consider the cookie impact. Omitting www leaves you no choice but to write cookies to </i>.example.org, so for performance reasons it’s best to use the www subdomain and write the cookies to that subdomain.* via <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html</a><p>My own takes: <a href="http://eapen.in/to-www-or-not-to-www/" rel="nofollow">http://eapen.in/to-www-or-not-to-www/</a> <a href="http://eapen.in/to-www-or-not-to-www-update/" rel="nofollow">http://eapen.in/to-www-or-not-to-www-update/</a>

While designing a webcrawler I found out how a LOT of sites are reachable using www.example.com and not using example.com. Some browser just tend to try the www. prefix if they can't connect/resolve the non-www one. This is why nobody finds out about it and the internet is somewhat broke :(

It doesn't matter much. just take care that you don't have two domains with the same content.<p>www.example.com and example.com are different sites to Google and have different cookies as well.

It wouldn't matter if www.foo.bar and foo.bar both resolved to the target, all too often the www. prefix is the only one that works. Get that sorted then worry about deprecating the prefix.

One step further: remove '.com' from the end. For those domains that fit.<p>e.g. <a href="http://www.hp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hp.com</a> =&#62; hp

For some stupid reason I was using IE6 in class not portable Chrome. We were told a website to go to and I was surprised the normally with-it teacher said www. Turned out it was required, the page didn't load at all without it.<p>It's one of those stupid corporate/educational vestiges left, like IE6.

yes, it should be, for all the reasons listed in the first post on that page at the bottom

I believe Tim Berners-Lee himself has said that he regrets introducing the "www." prefix. [citation needed]<p>Edit: he was, in fact, regretting the double slashes. Thanks for the correction.

Not until you can do load balancing on GAE/AWS without it.

No it should not - missing off the www is as annoying as people who abuse the TLD, e.g. .tv means "I'm in Tuvalu" not "I'm on television lol".

I never liked the WWW. xxx.domain.tld should be a host name and not a service determinator.<p>my http blog is accessible on domain.tld:80 and my telnet comment interface runs on domain.tld:1337 :)<p>if you're curious about the telnet interface: <a href="http://fettemama.org/faq_en.html" rel="nofollow">http://fettemama.org/faq_en.html</a>

Sure it should, there is no value whatsoever in `www` subdomains. It's a relic from a time when admins lacked a bunch of tools and clues.