Is the new web the end of the humble WWW? It may seem insignificant, but these three characters were the prefix of the revolution that was the web. But there’s a growing trend in websites making the prefix irrelevant to the domain or scrapping the WWW altogether. One site that notably has made the WWW irrelevant is Twitter which favours the prefixless domain over its WWW prefixed counterpart. To understand why the decline of the WWW is inevetible, we must first understand what the WWW is.
The origins of the WWW stem from a problem in the early days of the internet. There was no way to distinguish seperate services, such as websites from an FTP server, on domains. This led to the creation of sub-domains. Any domain could have them and the early format for these sub-domains was service.domain.com (e.g. ftp.techbe.at). For a while this was incredibly useful for setting up multiple services on multiple computers all acting under one domain. Then with the advent of the web, another format came about. This format was service://domain.com. In the instance of a website we now have http:// which distinguishes the service we want, so there was no longer a need for the WWW but we hung on to it. All this formed the present day URL scheme of http://www.domain.com/.
Fast forward to the present day, and innovation is growing rapidly in the web application space. There is also a growing impatience with the web and technology in general. We all want to access the resources we want when we want and this has sent developers scrambling to shave every second that can be saved off of their applications. This need to get applications accessible faster will be the death of the irrelevant WWW. It may seem short and that it doesn’t make a real difference to the time it takes you to access a resource. If you are like me you access many different and new websites every day and if you were to add up all the time spend typing out the WWW it will add up to a sizeable length of time. Yes it may be quick typing them out on your full size keyboard, but now with the exponential growth in the mobile internet it can take a while to punch in those W’s on the less that great keyboards provided on mobile devices or even on the chicklet type keyboards provided on netbooks. Not only that, since its a feature of almost all domains it gets very repetitive typing it out each time.
We are already seeing the decline begin with sites like Twitter and Facebook choosing their prefixless domain over their WWW prefixed domain although they both still allow the WWW. According to Compete analytics they both receive almost double the traffic on their non-WWW domain which shows that the majority of people prefer not having to type out the prefix. Its only a matter of time before developers and web masters pick up on this and switch to their non-www. Before we know it we will have The Death of WWW.
Do you really think the WWW is becoming less important now?
Source: The Death of WWW - Techbeat
The origins of the WWW stem from a problem in the early days of the internet. There was no way to distinguish seperate services, such as websites from an FTP server, on domains. This led to the creation of sub-domains. Any domain could have them and the early format for these sub-domains was service.domain.com (e.g. ftp.techbe.at). For a while this was incredibly useful for setting up multiple services on multiple computers all acting under one domain. Then with the advent of the web, another format came about. This format was service://domain.com. In the instance of a website we now have http:// which distinguishes the service we want, so there was no longer a need for the WWW but we hung on to it. All this formed the present day URL scheme of http://www.domain.com/.
Fast forward to the present day, and innovation is growing rapidly in the web application space. There is also a growing impatience with the web and technology in general. We all want to access the resources we want when we want and this has sent developers scrambling to shave every second that can be saved off of their applications. This need to get applications accessible faster will be the death of the irrelevant WWW. It may seem short and that it doesn’t make a real difference to the time it takes you to access a resource. If you are like me you access many different and new websites every day and if you were to add up all the time spend typing out the WWW it will add up to a sizeable length of time. Yes it may be quick typing them out on your full size keyboard, but now with the exponential growth in the mobile internet it can take a while to punch in those W’s on the less that great keyboards provided on mobile devices or even on the chicklet type keyboards provided on netbooks. Not only that, since its a feature of almost all domains it gets very repetitive typing it out each time.
We are already seeing the decline begin with sites like Twitter and Facebook choosing their prefixless domain over their WWW prefixed domain although they both still allow the WWW. According to Compete analytics they both receive almost double the traffic on their non-WWW domain which shows that the majority of people prefer not having to type out the prefix. Its only a matter of time before developers and web masters pick up on this and switch to their non-www. Before we know it we will have The Death of WWW.
Do you really think the WWW is becoming less important now?
Source: The Death of WWW - Techbeat
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