Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with those three letters that once defined the internet.
Have you ever wondered why those letters were there in the first place, and when exactly they became optional? Let’s dig into the archaeology of the early web and trace how this ubiquitous prefix went from essential to obsolete.
Where Did You Go?
It may shock you to find out that the “www.” prefix was actually never really a key feature or necessity at all. To understand why, we need only contemplate the very first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990. Running on a NeXT workstation employed as a server, the site could be accessed at a simple URL: “http//info.cern.ch/”—no WWW needed. Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and called it as such, but he hadn’t included the prefix in his URL at all. So where did it come from?
As it turns out, the www prefix largely came about due to prevailing trends on the early Internet. It had become typical to separate out different services on a domain by using subdomains. For example, a company might have FTP access on http://ftp.company.com, while the SMTP server would be accessed via the smtp.company.com subdomain. In turn, when it came to establish a server to run a World Wide Web page, network administrators followed existing convention. Thus, they would put the WWW server on the www. subdomain, creating http://www.company.com.
This soon became standard practice, and in short order, was expected by members of the broader public as the joined the Internet in the late 1990s. It wasn’t long before end users were ignoring the http:// prefix at the start of domains, as web browsers didn’t really need you to type that in. However, www. had more of a foothold in the public consciousness. Along with “.com”, it became an obvious way for companies to highlight their new fancy website in their public facing marketing materials. For many years, this was simply how things were done. Users expected to type “www” before a domain name, and thus it became an ingrained part of the culture.
Eventually, though, trends shifted. For many domains, web traffic was the sole dominant use, so it became somewhat unnecessary to fold web traffic under its own subdomain. There was also a technological shift when the HTTP/1.1 protocol was introduced in 1999, with the “Host” header enabling multiple domains to be hosted on a single server. This, along with tweaks to DNS, also made it trivial to ensure “www.yoursite.com” and “yoursite.com” went to the same place. Beyond that, fashion-forward companies started dropping the leading www. for a cleaner look in marketing. Eventually, this would become the norm, with “www.” soon looking old hat.
Of course, today, “www” is mostly dying out, at least as far as the industry and most end users are concerned. Few of us spend much time typing in URLs by hand these days, and fewer of us could remember the last time we felt the need to include “www.” at the beginning. Of course, if you want to make your business look out of touch, you could still include www. on your marketing materials, but people might think you’re an old fuddy duddy.
Using the www. prefix can still have some value when it comes to cookies, however. If you don’t use the prefix and someone goes to yoursite.com, that cookie would be sent to all subdomains. However, if your main page is set up at http://www.yoursite.com, it’s effectively on it’s own subdomain, along with any others you might have… like store.yoursite.com, blog.yoursite.com, and so on. This allows cookies to be more effectively managed across a site spanning multiple subdomains.
In any case, most browsers have taken a stance against the significance of “www”. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge all hide the prefix even when you are technically visiting a website that does still use the www. subdomain (like http://www.microsoft.com). You can try it yourself in Chrome—head over to a www. site and watch as the prefix disappears from the taskbar. If you really want to know if you’re on a www subdomain or not, though, you can click into the taskbar and it will give you the full URL, HTTP:// or HTTPS:// included, and all.
The “www” prefix stands as a reminder that the internet is a living, evolving thing. Over time, technical necessities become conventions, conventions become habits, and habits eventually fade away when they no longer serve a purpose. Yet we still see those three letters pop up on the Web now and then, a digital vestigial organ from the early days of the web. The next time you mindlessly type a URL without those three Ws, spare a thought for this small piece of internet history that shaped how we access information for decades. Largely gone, but not yet quite forgotten.
Ummm, most of us go to hackaday.com/blog since you moved it and we don’t like it…
Ok, well, I do anyhow…. :D
Same here. And as it is saved in the browser open tabs, no need to go to the first page anyway.
One of us have just found out what the most of us is apparently doing. What is the advantage?
+1
+1
yup… …and either the entire minority showed up or I’m not near as alone as I thought I was.
Minority, in the sense that most people hit hackaday.com/home vs hackaday.com/blog, but the race is much tighter than you might think!
Yesterday’s stats, for instance: 57% home, 43% blog.
Another interesting stat would be how many click through to the blog within 10 seconds.
Great point, add those up and 🤷🏼♂️.
I only go to Blog myself, and rarely end up on the home page 😆
Yes this a thousand times. I only ever go to the frontpage in error and look for the blog link as quickly as possible.
I do… neither? Thanks for the RSS feed, may it persist indefinitely :D
I think I’ve only manually browsed to Hackaday a handful of times. 99% of the time I get here via RSS.
+1
I also hand type “hackaday.com/blog” each time I visit (3-5 times a week)
As for is the home better or worse, that’s an other story.
It’s not because I don’t use something that it’s bad.
I had forgotten I was even doing this, looks like there’s a lot of that.
I actually like the default page as it gives me some old articles I may have missed from a day or two ago due to how frequently HaD published articles
As a designer –
We drop off the www prefix whenever possible both from the actual websites and from printed materials.
However, if companies have an unusual TLD (.info etc, or some clever TLD doma.in trick) then we often do include the www so people recognise it as a web address. Users mainly recognise .com and .org, and in the UK .co.uk and .org.uk as domains (and hence websites). Beyond that, we found recognition drops sharply.
One thing to note is that while http://www.hackaday.com can be a CNAME, hackaday.com cannot, which is unfortunate and part of the reason why www can still sometimes be seen.
Browsers also often strip it when displaying URLs in their address bar for brevity.
There was also a reluctance to actually assign an A record to the domain itself by many network admins ( and/or some tools in use ), not to mention other services which might live on a particular host and a lack of software to filter/route by port or service. Likewise there was a very small number of people who pushed ‘http’ as the preferred hostname instead of ‘www’, since that tracked with all the others in use at the time ( ftp, smtp, pop, gopher, etc. )
We pointed “home” to the user machine for home pages on ~username folders, which was already hosting gopher home docs.
“www” went to a different server setup just for trying out this new httpd thing by hosting our own “yellow pages ad”, and later is where we put all the ‘virtual hosts’
Later “secure” went to yet a different server, because SSL certs were expensive, and used it for many things like the setting portal, billing, and the signup page.
But you’re right, we never had an A/cname record on the root domain, and our network guy was adamant about it. I never knew why.
If there is a problem with the MX record, won’t MTAs use the A record to deliver mail? I wonder if that’s why.
paragraph 4, sentence 3. smTp vs typo smPt.
“while the SMTP server would be accessed via the smpt.company…”
(deleting this comment is totally reasonable, haha)
Those of us with dyslexia didn’t even notice ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I thought I fixed that. Maybe I only got one of them? Will do!
I also tend to leave out http:// or https:// when typing.
Me, too. I blame https here, the forwarding from http to https not always work.
So leaving it out lets the browser or server figure out what’s correct.
When using wayback machine, however, I DO enter the exact URL most of the time.
I purposefully don’t forward from http to https, because I want to support users who are stuck on older browsers or infrastructure that isn’t friendly to modern https, and I only require https for things that require login or security. Unfortunately this can end up causing a lot of subtle (and thankfully minor) problems of their own.
Technically http and https can result in completely different websites which is a “fun fact” I’ve taken advantage of in the past, but a lot of webcrawlers assume that both sites will be equivalent to one another, so it’s a bad idea to do that if you care at all about having both sites be indexed.
Hi, I’m still typing www. – it’s a cultural thing.
I just don’t like to degenerate so much like all the people surrounding me, I suppose..
Btw, back in 1997, the children’s program, on German TV, still thought kids to type in http:// first, then add http://www., then the name of the homepage, then the suffix.
I miss this level of culture.
Nowadays, people nolonger even say “my internet connection doesn’t work” but “my internet is broken”. 🙄😮💨
They actually say “my wifi is broken” …
Hi there! In Germany, we have no “wifi”, just WLAN.. ;)
And here I thought this article was about how not only AIs and other ad content spam/slop fills more and more of the net with trash but how most users today
– don’t link when they reference something.
– have never learned “how to ask for help on (the internet / in text form)”[1].
– just post their spam questions/content without even trying to search first.
– are forced to use platforms that are unsuitable for the task (NO! Reddits are not forums).
[1]
*[Justin Pot – “How To Ask Questions Online & Actually Get Answers https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-ask-questions-online-actually-get-answers-opinion/ (from 2012!)
* Alex Eames – “How to ask for (and receive) technical help on the internet https://raspi.tv/2017/how-to-ask-for-and-receive-technical-help-on-the-internet
* wikiHow – “Formulating Your Question” https://www.wikihow.com/Ask-a-Question-on-the-Internet-and-Get-It-Answered#Formulating-Your-Question
* Eric Steven Raymond / Rick Moen – “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way” http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (“Copyright © 2001,2006,2014” – Web 0.0 warning)
* and here’s a video: Ask for help like a pro! – DevConf.CZ 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkjGUNELwlE
reddit is totally a type of internet forum. Now Discord on the other hand …
Hmm – to me some required aspects for something to be a forum are these:
continuous threads – you may display a tree structure, maybe even hide downvoted replies (but NEVER OPs) but always all replies in chronological order.
OPs never change position depending on their vote ratio.
An old thread getting a new reply must get to the front/top again (reddit is a ridiculous mess of the same questions/posts again and again (at least if it’s actually used as a forum-replacement and/or the mods don’t care)). Maybe with an addition sort option but chronological order of OPs (not just last replies).
Less/no social media voting BS that influences visibility (maybe for replies).
lol…. those ^^ where four separete points but HaD won’t display 1. 2. 3. 4.?! wtf
one
two
three
four
^^ there should be 4 points again.
I have bad news for everybody. “Most” users don’t type “http”, or “www”, or even “.com”. They type the name of the website into the URL bar, then either select the highlighted browser history entry from autocomplete, or hit enter, get a search page from the default provider (which is absolutely definitely Google), then click the top link. “Most” users don’t type domain names at all.
Ah crap this is actually worse than what I just wrote — “most” users visit the site by taping the app they installed on their phone the first time they visited the website and it popped up “Floopr is better in the app!” 😭😭😭
And it isn’t better in the app, its worse. I exclusively buy old Android cellphones for my personal use, and debloat them.
I pay for youtube* but have the app disabled/un-installed because it was draining half my battery before noon even if I never opened it (come on guys, write better code). I do run into brain dead web design, from boxes I can’t click because they are under my “taskbar” to Cinemark blocking me for ‘suspicious activity’ if I visit their site with ‘desktop mode’ turned on in Chrome. I think they fixed that one, maybe.
Same for all Samsung apps, including Galaxy Store and any carrier bloat. Once my carrier app helpfully disabled my wife’s WiFi (it was stupidly attempting to connect to a neighbor’s hotspot and failing,). This cost us 1.9GB of Data. And no my wife is not very technically literate, but they push this tech on everyone now. Last time I tried to do flip phones I bought my own new online, was going to buy 4 lines if service too. The lady said that they weren’t allowed to activate them. They were 4G phones too. It’s a racket.
It’s not that bad as a family plan, and I find the ads offensive to my sensibilities and intelligence.
“Most users” don’t even know what the world wide web is.
They don’t even know the difference between a website, a web browser and an, ugh, “app”.
I blame the smartphone for the mental degeneration.
In the 90s and early 2000s, the desktop PC users weren’t as quite as dumbed down yet.
I mean, there certainly were “DAUs” (German term, means dumbest assumable users) for years.
But those guys could at least handle paperworks, still.
They just couldn’t think in an abstract way.
It’s not mental degeneration (what a weird thing to say). It’s that it’s just more easily accessible without needing to know those things. It’s a bit arrogant to ridicule people who don’t know the terminology. It would be like someone ridiculing you because you took a commercial flight and don’t know an the technical details of flying an aircraft. You don’t need to know those things unless it interests you, and so you don’t know those things.
I think it is disrespectful of users that they are no longer interested in how the technology works. They can easily look it up.
I was working in a house a couple weeks ago and upstairs heard one new homeowner say to the other ‘but we don’t have wired Internet, we have wifi!’… …as I’m looking at their ISP router with open ports and a bundle of not-terminated cat6 going to various locations throughout the house.
So… At the very least, they signed up for a service they don’t understand the capabilities of and bought a new house from a builder who had network wire pulled throughout.
People call up an ISP, someone shows up, drills a hole, runs a wire and plugs in a magic box that lets their phone google things.
…worthy of ridicule at every turn.
I have seen coworkers type “Google.com” into … Google.
I didn’t know I could restrain myself that much.
Be grateful.
The alternative is they start a support ticket to get someone to type it for them.
The IT Crowd taught me that if you Google Google, it breaks the Internet
“Few of us spend much time typing in URLs by hand these days” WHAT?!
I remember when apple.com redirected you to http://www.apple.com. I guess it was trying to make a point.
It’s not so long ago that microsoft.com had no ipv6 record but www. did. Something about history rhyming ..
For CDN network www is necssary for load balancer
I forgot the last time I typed www. in a browser. Probably in Netscape, ca. 2000.
The only reason I (and I guess any website builder that ever generated a sitemap) enforce www and https is simply because for a webcrawler it is a different page to include or exclude www and https. Allowing a pointless slash at the end of your URL (often added by crawlers), also makes it technically an other page than the one without a slash.
You do get Google penaltie-points from having lots of identical pages on your site, so enforcing one way is is important!
Note that most PHP+Apache and PHP+Litespeed sites actually give a full page answer (which is then ignored by the browser) when using http. The browser reacts on the Location: header, but the content is served too. This is because the most common way to enforce https is by a RewriteRule in .htaccess and not with a redirect. Press F12 and click the network tab, and type in a php’ domainname without https, and click on the first traffic, and check the content ;)
+1 to download all HaD articles via FTP!
It eases mirroring and preserving multiple copies of the content across the internet.
I’ll burn them on CD and mail them to you! :)
Hackaday should have gopher and gemini feeds.
Given the nature of the site it really should.
That could be an excuse to bring back the www. Well, not a reason you would HAVE to but you could.
The reason it stayed long after it was needed was simple.
QR codes didn’t exist so urls in print had to be recognizable as a url. People had to memorize them or write them down so they could visit the website at a later moment when they had access to a PC.
Search engines sucked so a lot of urls were spread by word of mouth too.
If you see a url without https:// and without www it is not always clear for everyone it is a url.
Especially if the top level domain isn’t .com but something weird like .me (montenegro).
The convention of starting a web address with www makes it recognizable as a url in print.
“In any case, most browsers have taken a stance against the significance of “www”. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge all hide the prefix even when you are technically visiting a website”
This false! I use firefox and it doesn’t hide www. What a useless feature to lie to the user about the url. It’s probably to dumb things down.
As a early member in the it/networking profession starting before DNS was in use and emails where forwarded with sendmail and uucp my address was ..!mcvax!enea!erix!bosse
In the early times with our first internet connection we where running one computer for each network service, each computer with stripped down os and all unnecessary services turned off.
This of course made each service having individual A address, this was easy for us as our company received a B address range.
For grate justice, downlaod are app!!! and make shure to liek and subscribe!!1!
Not having to click through useless garbage to get to the only relevant content on the site?
You know that almost all browsers let you ctrl-enter to surround whatever you typed in the url bar with http:// and .com right?
This has been a thing since early Netscape Navigator.
reminds me of http://no-www.org :)