Don’t type that “www.” anymore!

Recently I saw an article on a group called no-www that advocate changing the way people talk about and type internet addresses. They make perfect sense. Don’t use, type, or tell anyone to go to “www.” anything anymore.

History: In the beginning (of the Internet) browsers used the “www.” subdomain to tell the resource you were connecting to that you were going to be using port 80 and the http protocol. All browser (for some time now) have been using port 80 and http as default. There is no need to explicitly state this, because they are going to do it anyway.

no-www’s goal is to get all of the traffic to http://www.yourdomain.com redirected to http://yourdomain.com. That way, no one is losing service or not getting to where they want to go, but they are being reminded that “www.” is no longer needed. If you noticed when you came to this website, if you typed www.thesmithsplace.com, you have been redirected to thesmithsplace.com.

So try it out and see if it makes your life a little easier. Next time, don’t type that www.!

UPDATE: Well, the .htaccess rewrites hosed my gallery installation, so I quit rerouting people who came from http://www. to just http://.  Oh well, it was a noble idea anyway.