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Interesting. From my observation less and less sites actually use the www subdomain. Some give plain 404, domain not found, certificate errors and similar when
by numlock86 7y ago
Interesting. From my observation less and less sites actually use the www subdomain. Some give plain 404, domain not found, certificate errors and similar when browsing them with (or without) www, depending on how they are set up. It's a mess, really. Usually they actually behave the same, including TLS configuration etc.
Also something I observe daily: When I tell someone to go to "example.com" some will punch in "www.example.com", others will simply do "example.com". There is also the ultra rare occurrence of someone typing in "http://www.example.com" http://www.example.com".
Personally I just configure www to point at the same as the regular domain and have the www as a "subject alternative name" in the certificates. And in Nginx it's as easy as just adding it to the "server_name". I suspect it's the same for all other major HTTPDs.
- xg15 7y agoI wonder how generalizable your experience is, though. I imagine this could very well be a trend in tech circles, where knowledge is widespread that "www" is mostly optional and the domain name is the relevant part. (And people tend to enter a lot of urls manually so they shorten them as much as possible). I could imagine that this might be different among non-technical users, where the exact meaning of domains, subdomains and the "https" and "www" prefixes are less well-known. I have no data to back that up, though.
- toomanybeersies 7y agoMy (also non-data backed) guess would be it's a generational thing. When I was a kid in the early 2000's, most web addresses were "www.domain.com", that's what you'd see on written material like advertising or articles. These days if an ad has a web address it usually doesn't include the `www.` subdomain.
- feanaro 7y agoI would say the opposite. From my experience technical users are the ones that insist on "www" while non-technical users just follow the general trend of eliding it and are unaware of what it means exactly.
- tester344 7y agoWeird. I'd rather say that tech users would use shorter version because there should be no diff between www/nowww
- gumby 7y agoWhy should there inherently be no difference?. They are simply nMes. I’ve had people tell me things are broken when I send them to foo.example.com and they insist on typing the nonexistent www.foo.example.com.
- feanaro 7y agoExactly. The point is that there is a difference between www and nowww. The only reason they usually lead to the same result nowadays is a social convention and those can change arbitrarily. Tech people are aware of this but non-tech people notice and learn this convention by association and might be (and from my experience, are) unaware that it is not a technically guaranteed one.
- 6nf 7y agoAnnoyingly Chrome doesn't even show the 'www' any more unless you actually click on the URL bar
- numlock86 7y agoFor me it even takes two clicks: The first will just mark the visible URL, the second will reveal the complete URL including the protocol.
- feanaro 7y agoThese URL mangling behaviours of Chrome are getting really insane. It kind of works for very well known, ultra large sites like Facebook, Youtube, Google and other large corporations, but how are you supposed to know whether you're at the right place for the myriad of smaller and/or personal websites if most of the URL is hidden?
- Avamander 7y agoHonestly, you should be redirecting from either www. to . or vice versa, having one of them broken or doing something else is bad in 99.99% of cases.
- notfashion 7y agoThe way you are using "www." and "." is incorrect. The dot isn't part of the local hostname "www". It is a separator or delimiter for the textual elements in the domain name. "Redirecting from (or to) ." is a weird and as far as I know completely wrong way to talk about redirecting from or to the domain name one level up in the hierarchy. The only time a dot plays any role in a domain name (other than that of a simple separator) is when it's used at the end of the fully qualified domain name.
- Avamander 7y agoWhat if I'm talking about redirecting an entire TLD "www" to ""? Obviously it's a separator, I just found writing "" and "www" too weird. Not to mention that in this context where you're not really a recursive DNS resolver it really doesn't matter how one specifies the existence or lack of it of a subdomain. In addition to that some things use "@" (instead of the dot I used).
- z3t4 7y agoFor SEO reasons you should redirect to either one.