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unless I am hosting separate sites/IPs on subdomains, or have a complex cookie situation, I think the www. prefix seems vestigial/legacy and completely unneeded

unless I am hosting separate sites/IPs on subdomains, or have a complex cookie situation, I think the www. prefix seems vestigial/legacy and completely unneeded. I am actually in the opposite camp of not including it at all and redirecting to non-www. it sounds awfully ambiguous in speech ("double-u double-u double-u dot", "all the double-us dot", "dub dub dub dot", etc.) and most times multiplies the syllabic length of a "catchy" address. I even had an older client who said "stop" instead of "dot", and another who used @www. in an email address. I also think it looks silly and unprofessional on business cards, on the side of vans, etc., especially when http:// http:// and/or a trailing fowardslash is also included cringe. if it MUST exist, DNS does not always have to be involved, it could just be a simple http 301 forward or vhost config. we don't add :80 or :443 to the end of a web address. let the browser handle all that.

slig 7y ago
Now that Chrome is hiding the "www." it's going to look more and more legacy. I still use the "www." and probably will continue using, but for business cards and things like that I always use the bare domain.
gregmac 7y ago
It's worth making it exist and doing a 301 redirect. There's some people that will still type it, and others that will link it without checking, and they'll just think your site is broken. You're fighting against the grain for what's essentially a couple lines of config. It's not much different than using TLS for everything, but still handling and redirecting http:// http:// traffic (also doing a 301 redirect).
- toast0 7y ago
  It's also useful to set hsts for the whole domain. I'm opinionated enough to say if you type http://example.org/foo http://example.org/foo, I'm just going to redirect that to https://www.example.org/ https://www.example.org/ but reasonable people could disagree (especially since Chrome has been going back and forth on displaying the actual URL and something that's vaguely similar to it)
  - otterlicious 7y ago
    That would just be a giant middle finger to people who manually type URLs.
frereubu 7y ago
It depends on your audience, but setting it up just so you don't cringe could well be alienating a bunch of your potential user base. Seems like a strange trade-off. I think people here often forget that there's a mass of people out there who are nowhere near as technically literate and wouldn't have the faintest idea of what "DNS" stands for.
svacko 7y ago
The article https://bjornjohansen.no/www-or-not https://bjornjohansen.no/www-or-not (2017) persuaded me to still use www, however, opinions vary: * https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/ https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/ * https://dropwww.com/why https://dropwww.com/why

slig 7y ago

Now that Chrome is hiding the "www." it's going to look more and more legacy. I still use the "www." and probably will continue using, but for business cards and things like that I always use the bare domain.

gregmac 7y ago

It's worth making it exist and doing a 301 redirect. There's some people that will still type it, and others that will link it without checking, and they'll just think your site is broken. You're fighting against the grain for what's essentially a couple lines of config. It's not much different than using TLS for everything, but still handling and redirecting http:// http:// traffic (also doing a 301 redirect).

toast0 7y ago
It's also useful to set hsts for the whole domain. I'm opinionated enough to say if you type http://example.org/foo http://example.org/foo, I'm just going to redirect that to https://www.example.org/ https://www.example.org/ but reasonable people could disagree (especially since Chrome has been going back and forth on displaying the actual URL and something that's vaguely similar to it)
- otterlicious 7y ago
  That would just be a giant middle finger to people who manually type URLs.

frereubu 7y ago

It depends on your audience, but setting it up just so you don't cringe could well be alienating a bunch of your potential user base. Seems like a strange trade-off. I think people here often forget that there's a mass of people out there who are nowhere near as technically literate and wouldn't have the faintest idea of what "DNS" stands for.

svacko 7y ago

The article https://bjornjohansen.no/www-or-not https://bjornjohansen.no/www-or-not (2017) persuaded me to still use www, however, opinions vary: * https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/ https://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/ * https://dropwww.com/why https://dropwww.com/why