When the Internet was young most of us using it had no idea where it was heading. There were a plethora of new services that quickly joined file transfer (FTP) as the initial service: email (which began life as a file transfer), mailing list software (remember BITNET?), Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), Gopher, and the Web. We thought that we would have a growing ecology of these services and that they would co-habit for some period of time. Thus was born the convention.
I’m of course speaking of the “www” convention for domain names. The thought was that you would have multiple servers that might not be on the same physical machine over time. So if you established domain names for all of your services like this:
- wais.lib.berkeley.edu
- gopher.lib.berkeley.edu
- www.lib.berkeley.edu
you would then be free to move any of those services to another physical machine and simply change the numeric address to which the domain pointed. Also, anyone seeing the URL would know what client to point at it.
Of course this was all before Gopher, WAIS, etc. went to dust and only the Web remained. So now, I assert, it is way past time to drop this convention, since it is only a convention, and just go with the domain. Many individuals and organizations have already done this, but it still persists — mostly with advertising writers who still have no clue.
And don’t get me started about the “slash” business. I swear, if I ever find the advertising hack who started the “back slash” business, I cannot be held accountable for my actions. Still, today, in 2012, you hear radio announcers spewing such drivel as “forward slash” when pronouncing a URL, and — horrors! — even “back slash”. Just shoot me.
So it’s clearly past time to get over “double-you, double-you, double-you” on all the radio commercials and in typing a URL. Drop it and no one gets hurt.
About Roy Tennant
In Italian, they pronounce it “vu vu vu” which reminds me of “va-va-va voom.” Let’s switch to that.
“…mostly with advertising writers who still have no clue.”
Don’t agree. ‘www’ might not work in the world of audio but visually it’s a shorthand way of saying ‘this is a web address’. If you look on advertising say on a bus or subway, imagine how the web address would look without that ‘www’ and whether — cognitively — it’d be as effective.
I agree I think advertising using the www is a great way to express that the world wide web is the location. However it is all I know and where else would they be directing you to anyway: A newspaper, television channel, or radio station? Maybe we can do without the www, http://, and all other/s. Lol!
I remember the other roots you mention Roy. Since i use Chorme I never enter http or www. I like the idea of getting rid of it, but wonder how that easily translates into print or advertising clarity, as some other reader mention. The www lets MS Word know it is a URL. Surely there must be a simple solution.
Ah the history of “gopher” to “www’ to understood web address of google.com is reminicent of the rotary vs touch tone phone dialing methods in that ultimately your still making a phone call (or searching the web or telnet: site). The process is important to tech, but in reality we are ultimate making a phone call or searching the web.
PS. One of my first email accounts, some ~twenty years ago, was d2348154b@blahblah-school-initials-intermediary-plus-bitnet.edu — wow how things have changed…