No more WWW prefixes!

The net has changed a lot since I first jacked in back in '96. (I was using an Acorn A440 back i those days!). I remember the telegraph two page diagram I had on my wall then which illustrated what the World Wide Web was an how it was a layer on top of the "Internet" servers and dialup connections.

Things have moved on though, we don't say the World Wide Web any more, or even the WWW in capitals. We just say the "web" and some people even now say "interweb".

Another thing that has changed is we don't even use the www prefix on URLs often now, and to be frank they weren't necessary from the outset, as they are just an alias of the main domain. So take my site for instance, that runs on jguk.org's ANAME record, it would be the same machine that ran on www.jguk.org. I actually set up the www prefixed hostname to redirect after a short pause just so I don't miss any hits though still ;)

Of cause there is the counter view, take this one by HM2K. That doesn't mention that a hostname doesn't need to symbolise protocol information as well, ftp://jguk.org/ already symbolises the protocol nicely, so setting it up as ftp://ftp.jguk.org/ is not necessary. Likewise http://jguk.org/ already indicates that is a website URL because of the http:// prefix! HM2K follows the same logic that some programmers use by prefixing variable names with a string of letters to denote "type", when the development environment knows the type and will show it, and the debugger knows the type. As in programming, a prefix is really only good to denote scope, so internal.jguk.org is obviously not a public URL, and we will know that URL will not work from the internet.

URLs seem to be the wrong way around too (Tim Berners-Lee also said this recently I recall), they go from right -> left, alternate to the directory structure on the tail of the URL. When on the precursor to the internet people did write the other way, so UK.AC.CAM was probably the way Cambridge uni appeared!? (Should find example here!). So if we stuck to that with URLs, my website URL would actually be http://org/jguk/images/K800front.jpg

Returning to the WWW prefix debate, shorter URLs are also better for mobile devices! ;)