Nix on "www."
The movement to eliminate
"double-you-double-you-double-you dot"
from web site names
Dave Yost
"World Wide Web" is elegant. "Double-you-double-you-double-you" is not.
Who needs it?
Better web sites everywhere are dispensing with the "www." in front of their name (well, you can still use it, but you don't have to, and you don't have to speak it or listen to it either). It's so nice to hear a radio announcer say "Borders.com", "About.com", or "GE.com" without those ten useless extra syllables!
It's easy. It doesn't cost anything. It's compatible. People can still get to you with "www.". If you have a web site, here's how easy it is to do your part:
- Use a web service provider that can automatically take people to YourHost.com when they enter www.YourHost.com. DreamHost, my wonderful web service provider, lets me choose this option.
- Ask your web provider to set up your web site so both addresses work: YourHost.com and www.YourHost.com. (If you’re running your own Apache web server, you can see how to do it here.)
- Leave www.YourHost.com working forever to support old links and bookmarks and to support people who will assume they have to use the "www." prefix. It doesn't cost anything.
- Optional and desirable: Remove all occurrances of "www." in your site name from of your web pages. (This is especially easy if you use a great text editor such as BBEdit for Mac OS.)
Hey, I know it's not a big deal. But if you do your part to help stamp out "www.", the world will be relieved of a silly little bit of tedium, and radio announcers and listeners will thank you. ;-)
If you're an ISP, you might consider offering to do the right thing for all web site domains you handle. Can't hurt.
One more thing. The retired WebDot page (which got a fair amount of media coverage including the New York Times, San Jose Mercury, and other newspapers) advocated prefixing "web." instead of just removing "www.". Back then that idea seemed to me to have a better chance of catching on than simply removing "www." It didn't. Just as well.
Now for the humorous portion of our programme
(to be read with pompous overacting, John Cleese, perhaps?)
"W" is a letter that is not one syllable, for that would be too few, a letter that is not two syllables, for that too would be too few, but a letter, in fact the one letter of all twenty-six that insists upon blathering on and on in its attempt to twist the tongue and overtax the ear, extending to the full three, yes three--three syllables, the legal alphabetical maximum. But wait, my friend. That is only the beginning. We go on to treble the damages by repeating this freak letter, this monstrosity that is one thing, claims to be two other things, but is really three things, not once, not twice, but a full three times, in a nonometric rhapsody fleshed out to the nines, a compound triplicate triumphant cat-o'-nine-tails tongue-lashing, a nonotuple witches' syllabic brew of treble, treble, toil and trouble.
It is enough I say! Nine times enough, in fact.
As Professor Strunk might have said, "Omit needless syllables."
Or as Elmer Fudd said, "Aye, dare's da wub."
And as a Southern colonial governor once said, "I hearby dub ya 'Dub-ya Dub-ya Dub-ya.'"
And remember, it's "wub-a-dub-dub-dub, nine men in a tub".
And now for our song, sung to "row, row, row your boat":
Double-u, double-u, double-u dot, DownTheStream dot com,
Double-u, double-u, double-u, double-u -- enough already.
Comments and misc info from readers and webmasters:
From: Robert M. Dailey rob<neatpeople>org
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004You forgot one of the more pratical, as well as technically satisfying approaches.
Configure your server to accept www., but then strip it from the url, so people may take a little more notice.
in httpd.conf:
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain\.org [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$ RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://yourdomain.org/$1 [L,R]Will remove that nasty crap. I have been advocating removing that waste of space for a while now. Checkout www.suspected.org too see the magic take place.
Simon Banton at web.org.uk in the U.K. cheered this page and mentioned that he put up a page that makes the same plea in July, 1997. He quips "www is to 9 as web is to 1".
-
Alternate pronunciations for "www":
- woof, woof, woof (the New Yorker approved pronunciation)
- woo, woo, woo (the New Age version)
- hex-you
- six-you
- wubble, wubble, wubble
- Tri-Dub (inspired by "Vee-Dub")
- way-way-way
- wah-wah-wah
- triplya
- v6 (three "Ws" are six "Vs")
Three times three is an Ancient power number in esoteric lore. Perhaps the first sites were uncertain of their competence?
From: Rose.White<parexel>com
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 15:54:51 -0400I just wanted to point out that if W.W. Norton weren't in the vanguard in their use of web-dot, then they would be www.WWNorton.com, which would be a true travesty.
[Turns out that W.W. Norton got cold feet and decided to downplay web.wwnorton.com in favor of a more "standard" official name for the site. Yes, you guessed it, it's
www.wwnorton.com.
This one really takes the cake! -DY]Personally, I'd rather change the pronunciation of the letter 'w'. I've got two of the damn things in my initials (JWW) and the clumsy name of that letter is a pain. The English name for that letter is based on the French "doobla-vay" (double V). We could always adopt the German name, which in English would be pronounced "way". Then I could tell people that my web page is on "way way way dot rahul dot net". Much better, don't you think?
Another alternative: aaa instead of www at aaa.wraithspace.com. Hey, it's three syllables instead of nine.
From: Ken Arnold
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1998 14:08:45 -0400 (EDT)My less/more radical solution to the "www" problem is to try and introduce a monosyllabic name for the letter: "wah" (rhymes with "ah", as in "Say 'ah'.") So it becomes "wah-wah-wah-dot-..."
There is also a basic issue of fairness that is thus resolved: 'w' is the only polysylabically-named letter in the alphabet, which is unfair to it.-)
From: Shirien Stevens sstevens<darkwing.uoregon>edu
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 07:06:54 -0800 (PST)[claims to have invented "triplya" as a solution to the www problem.]
From: Michael Castle michael.castle<mci2000>com
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 05:59:43 -0500100 % agree, 'web.' is quicker and easier, and with inceasing popularity, let's make it easier to talk about. For purists, there is always 'the web site formally know as 'www', that should be hard enough to say to keep them happy.
From: Matt Braithwaite matt<braithwaite>net
Date: 16 Aug 1999 21:28:42 -0700I'm surprised your web page at http://web.yost.com/Misc/webdot.html doesn't mention Ambrose Bierce's classic complaint (from _The Devil's Dictionary_), which shows that there's nothing new about annoyance with `dubya', and makes YA suggestion about pronunciation:
W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like _epixoriambikos_. Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of "the glory that was Greece" and the rise of "the grandeur that was Rome." There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it "wow," for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.
By the way, I can add the spelling of the Greek word:
epsilon pi iota chi omicron rho iota alpha mu beta iota kappa omicron sigma
Yow. Maybe we English speakers, with only one polysyllabic letter, really ought to count our blessings, eh?
Feel free to use the 
graphic (especially if you link it to this page).
http://Yost.com/misc/nix-on-www.html - this page
1997-09-14 Created
2005-04-24 Modified
2000-10-16 Added Cleese, heard this page is being passed around Google w.r.t. Tim Berners-Lee confession