Do we really need to type the "www." prefix to every single website we wish to visit? Everyone knows that a website is hosted on
the World Wide Web, so they do not need to be told so every time they type a URL. Last time I checked, I didn't have any site hosted on my Intranet with the name "google.co.uk", so it's extremely important that I tell my browser it should begin it's DNS search on the World Wide Web. That sounds logical, but searching your Intranet before the Internet is not a big deal, it takes a mere nanosecond (or less!) to look at your Intranet and see whether "google.co.uk" exists. Most browsers browse your Intranet to begin with anyway, regardless of whether you have typed the "www." prefix or not.
Why don't we start auto-truncating the "www." from all websites, so the 95% of society who never knew what it stood for in the first place can chill out and stop typing it. We should adopt a new practice: shred the "www." prefix.
I really don't think it is a good idea to truncate the whole of the "www." prefix from every single website, even if no-one seems to understand what it means, this will cause people to become even more confused than they were before. It has begun to happen though; most television advertisements you see that include text containing their website's URL do not include the "www." prefix. Yet more than half of the people who then navigate to the website (after seeing the advertisement) type the "www." and about a quarter of those people go all the way and type "http://www." as well.
In my opinion, I think that we should keep the prefix for any URL that does not have a sub-domain; for instance if you were to navigate to the Google homepage you should append the "www." prefix to the front of the URL to make it look tidier, but if you wanted to navigate to the Google Image Search page you would lose the prefix because the sub-domain in "http://images.google.co.uk/" is "images", thus making "images." the replacement of "www.".
Uniform Resource Locators are funny things though.
Bull3t's Blog is a next generation web log written by me, Philip Hughes (also known as Bull3t), a first-year college student living in England, aged 17. I write this blog for the sake of doing so, posting about anything I see fit. 
So what now?
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March 23rd, 2008
#1
I agree. Getting rid of it now would just confuse people.
May 31st, 2008
#2
I will try something more home system orientated at a later date, but until then my status on Linux as a home system stays as "not the best idea". I do use Linux for all of my websites and servers though and it has been perfect in that respect.But I agree with your blog because use of WWW show all the status of site.
November 18th, 2008
#3
While I agree in principal many would feel lost without their www. It is just as simple to define your domains with both www and non www. The problem is those who dont define their domain without the www. I had a customer who ran an intranet/extranet on our hosting service and refused to define the domain without the www. He used to say if they were too lazy to type it in then they didn't deserve to find his Portal. So if they truncated all the domains out there 10% of the web might go dark, which in retrospect might not be a bad thing!
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