On a mailing list I’m on someone just pointed to no-www.org. It’s been awhile since I’ve run across that site (or, before it existed, Slashdot commenters condemning use of TCWWW — The Cursed WWW), but I strongly agree — www. in a domain name is pointless.
Even worse is index.php in the path. You’ve taken the time to publish a website, now take a few minutes to make its URLs less ugly. I’m not going to bother setting up no-index-php.org, but someone should. However, in the spirit of no-www.org, here are a couple resources for removing index.php from popular software installations:
- WordPress Codex on using permalinks — in many cases WordPress will produce the right
.htaccessfile automatically, but if you have to fiddle, the default behavior of identifying a post in the querystring with an integer (e.g.,?p=1913) has a strong appeal, while the “almost pretty” option is extremely ugly. - MediaWiki Manual:Short URL — when this page lived on meta.wikimedia.org, it was appropriated called Eliminating index.php from the url.
Please remove index.php from your URLs, or signal that you have no taste, no technical abilities, or both.
Thanks!
I was long in the no-www camp.
But then via the Yahoo ‘Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site’, I was reminded that if your site’s cookies are set on domain.com, they will be sent to every subdomain.domain.com, too. That presents problems for caching, even if you segment all static resources off to a ‘static.domain.com’ subdomain.
Solution: either set up a different owned domain like domainstatic.com for cacheable resources, or embrace the ‘www.’ and set your application cookies only on ‘www.domain.com’.
So the www is not all bad.
See: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_free
(Point taken about index.php, of course. Clean URLs are one of the dozens of little things that send a signal of craftsmanship to a savvy audience. Others that spring to mind: ALT/TITLEs for images; making radio/checkbox labels active; intuitive tab orders; layouts that work at different font sizes; form submits that redirect to non-POST reloadable pages.)
Also: for a site that has (or may have) different language versions, the wikipedia per-language subdomain approach is nice. It offers a subdomain on which to hang the login cookie — such as en.wikipedia.org — that’s more meaningful than ‘www.’.
Good point re caching. It seems that Yahoo takes the domainstatic.com approach — yimg.com — though yahoo.com redirects to http://www.yahoo.com.
I do like meaningful subdomains where appropriate.
‘www’ could have been selected to cue the speaker to greater precision in their speech and the listener to greater concentration in correctly interpreting the following identifier. A sort of line conditioner like the ten pulses of the zero that starts all telephone numbers (well, it worked like that once).
It also serves as a good audio marker for any speech analysis software.
Ok, so TBL just thought it looked cute – and then made up some lame excuse about it being memorable and standing for ‘world wide web’.
In spoken language the ‘www’ is a better cue than ‘h-t-t-p’.
Yahoo misses all those little signs of craftsmanship pretty often. I spent months attempting to get GUIDs out the URLs.
The yimg URLs go to akamai or y’s internal caching network.
Label me a troll, but I think the no-www movement in downright idiotic. mail.domain.com, anyone? How about http://ftp.domain.com? Or irc.domain.com? The Internet is much more than just the Web, you know.
As for the index.php issue, how about not wanting to code a server-specific solution into a server-independent application? Not everyone uses Apache, strange as it may sound. Yeah, index.php looks ugly and lenghtens the URL unnecessarily, but getting rid of it is always a hack.
Felix, that’s not remotely a troll.
Only web browsers really present an interface where domain.com is expected to work. However, if you want to use http://www.domain.com for the web, please make domain.com redirect to http://www.domain.com rather than serving the same content from both.
The worst kind of index.php visibility is that which is just an incomplete server-specific solution. There is something nice about zero need for htaccess or equivalent, which for wordpress means you see something like blog.domain.com/index.php?p=531 and I can respect that. However, the amount of htaccess or equivalent routing to get nice looking and informative to humans urls is trivial and as far as I know supported by all modern web servers that support non-static content at all.