Back in the early days of the World Wide Web every website had a “www.something” type domain. When I first got access to the internet around 1995 I quickly learned that www meant it was a website. Type in www.whatever.whatever in a webbrowser and that meant there was a website.
What I didn’t understand back then of course was how the Internet worked. I didn’t understand things like DNS, I didn’t understand webservers or what powered them. All I knew was that I had a browser (Netscape!) and the power to put adresses in it and access all kinds of content.
Nowadays I understand why the www-subdomain got so much attention. This was because back in the early ’90s when the dubyadubyadubya was invented websites were the exception, not the norm. Back then it was things like Gopher, Usenet, Archie and all those other arcane tools which now mostly have gone the way of the Dodo. Back then it was a quick and simple hack to make a domain “world wide web-aware” and point it to whatever tiny little webserver you were running.
This of course kept on, and became the norm. A quick and dirty little hack became a standard, and now it’s so deeply entrenched in the collective psyche that it’s difficult to stop using it.
I thought the www-subdomain was some kind of magic affair back then. It isn’t. It’s simply a redirect in the DNS, DNS being the Domain Name System, the system that resolves human-readable domains and translates them into difficult-to-remember IP adresses.
Today we keep using the www.something fashion of setting up domains even though it’s become completely redundant. The vast majority of traffic on the Internet today is on the world wide web, and if you ask any teenager what Gopher is they’ll say it’s a ground-dwelling rodent.
There are plenty people out there advocating that we should stop using the www. fashion of naming domains completely, and I agree with them. It’s an obsolete and deprecated tradition, and we shouldn’t continue teaching it’s use with new generations of Internet users. My own personal problem is that the habit of typing www.something is so deep that I often do it without thinking, and for me it’s an active and conscious thing reminding me not to use it.
So if you’re the owner of a site and domain, the proper way is to remove it. Rather than having http://www.something.com you should simply remove the www and people should put http://something.com in their browser instead. Do a DNS-redirect or even some more basic HTTP-redirect to get visitors to the right place. I’m going to undertake this myself soon and become more consistent in my web-presence.