I’ve always pondered over which to use for me domains, and I’ve always found the decision difficult because there isn’t an authorities answer, but, I believe there should be.

My brother recently said to me “I didn’t realise you didn’t need to www!”. And there in lies the problem. Seem people ‘think’ you don’t need it, some people think you have to use www, and the more techy amongst us know you should be able to use both but that’s not always the case. So the fact of the matter is; It couldn’t ‘become’ confusing if www was deprecated because it already ‘is’ confusing.

All my previous sites work on both but redirect to www. My latest site I have done it the other way, but as the tld is a .me it looks odd when in print without the www, more confusion then.

This topic got me thinking more than I wanted to!

I was going to say; the answer is to keep www the standard, but make it compulsory for example.com to direct to http://www.example.com. That way everyone knows that ‘if’ we type www or not, we still get the same site.

Some argue that; www should stay because it’s logical. I can see some reasoning behind that; spot the odd one out.

mail.example.com
http://ftp.example.com
irc.example.com
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com

I’m not the wiser however, and I still don’t know what to do. With a tld of .me, I feel it’s probably necessary to print the www. because people may not get it yet. Something else also, although youngsters find online activity second nature, I also recognise that the majority of users are more like my brother, in that they ‘think’ they know, when actually they don’t know the whole truth.

With that in mind, we have to accommodate all people online, and we do that by keeping www as a standard and redirect non-www.

My 2 pence.

inside the intranet, http://domain.com will yield to no access to the site because you are definitely inside that networt (domain.com) hence the qualified http://www.domain.com will get to the site with no problem. The other issue is most users are lazy to type in the URL, they go to google and search the domain. When they clicked the link, they are in the mercy of how Google canonicalize the web search engine.

The moral of this problem is to train the user the proper way of URL.

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De hecho empresas como Cloudflare necesitan forzosamente que las direcciones de los dominios que apuntemos a su servicio lleven el subdominio WWW, esto es porque todo el contenido de navegacion que pasa por dicho subdominio es filtrado por Cloudflare, pudiendo asi agregarle algunas caracteristicas para mejorar el rendimiento del dominio web.

– http://status.heroku.com/incident/156

While dwg’s definitions are certainly correct for traditional English, when used with respect to computing (programming languages in particular) “deprecated” refers to an obsolete programming language which is still in use all the same.

A nice description appears here:
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Deprecated

Languages evolve, and when a field rises as quickly as computing has it is only inevitable that new words (or meanings for existing words) are coined as a result.

deprecate: To express disapproval of; deplore.

depreciate: To lessen the price or value of. Or, to lower in estimation or esteem

obsolete: No longer in use, or no longer useful.

An example of their usage: As they feel it is obsolete, some people take it upon themselves to deprecate the continued use of the depreciated “www.” portion common in web site addresses.

@Jackson

How does sending users from http://www.example.com to example.com make things simpler?

Surely redirecting example.com to http://www.example.com would just as simple and better for the end user.