This page is provided for historical interest only. See the current Nix on "www." page.
The WebDot Campaign
(The Campaign To Replace
"double-you-double-you-double-you dot"
With "web dot")
Dave Yost
"World Wide Web" is elegant. "Double-you-double-you-double-you" is cumbersome in the extreme.
"Web" is short and clear.
Better web sites everywhere are starting their names with "web" instead of "www" or in addition to "www".
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:
- Ask your internet administrator to change the name of your web site to "web.YourHost.com", with "www.YourHost.com" as an alias.
- Leave "www.YourHost.com" in place forever to support old links and bookmarks. It doesn't cost anything.
- Optional: Change all occurrances of "www" to "web" in all of your web pages. (This is especially easy if you use a great text editor such as BBEdit for Mac OS.)
- If you have a corporate internal web site already named web.company.com: you might change its name to web.internal.company.com and while you're at it, put all of your internal domain names under internal.company.com so your employees can tell at a glance what's internal and what's public.
Hey, I know it's not a big deal. But if you do it, 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 doing what my ISP, Bay Area Internet Solutions, does: do the webdot thing for all www domains you handle. Can't hurt.
My research indicates that as of May 25, 1998, approximately 4% of web sites are reachable by a name starting with "web.". Later, I'll post here how I arrived at that number.
One more thing. Many of you out in web land write in to say, "why use the www or web prefix at all? Why not just say Yost.com?" Well, aside from the technical reasons why this may not be so easy to accomplish efficiently, there's the underappreciated fact that a little redundancy in communications can be a good thing. In case you didn't hear clearly or were distracted, the web dot prefix confirms that what you just heard was a web site address and not an email address or something completely different, for example. (If anyone knows a really good link on this topic, please let me know.)
Now for the humorous portion of our programme
(to be read with pompous overacting)
"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.
The simple Old English word "web", adopted from the ancient Monosyllabic falls easily off the tongue, transitions nicely to the "dot", and is unmistakable in its equivalence to its bombastic predecessor.
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:
- Simon Banton 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":
- 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.
- The web.mit.edu story
From: Tom Coppeto <tom@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: web.* sites
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1997 14:19:38 EDT [8 Oct: correction from '94 to '93 (!)]> Could you say a few authoritative words about how and when web.mit.edu
> came into being, especially vs. www.mit.edu?Sure. I set up web.mit.edu when in the summer of '93 I thought MIT ought to have a web site for all of MIT (I started out with 5 links and a snapshot of the Charles River). A few months earlier [January] a group of students (Student Information Processing Board) set up a web site for students and used the name www.mit.edu. This was one of the first group of web sites on the Internet.
Although much debated, I maintained that if we believed in what the web was about then it shouldn't matter what the "MIT server" was called. And the more practical argument was we have plenty of work to do as it is and although only a host table edit away, picking fights with student groups isn't on that list.
I think the fact that a student group has www says something about the culture at MIT. We don't care. We don't follow trends. We're different. What the students have to say can be as relevant as what anyone else has to say.
In any case http://mit.edu will bring you to our web server and I prefer that over web or www anyway. I think that the job the cwis group (many of whom are students who are also involved in running www.mit.edu) here does in developing the top level pages stands on it's own two feet and brings people back again and again regardless of the name.
The contact list for this web site is web-request@mit.edu (breaking yet another convention).
- Tom
- From: Dick Baker <dickbkr@goon.org>
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1998 09:48:19 -0400By the way, you'd better change your link to me to www.goon.org. I'm about to change hosts for my pages, and the new one charges extra for variations on domain names, so I didn't bother setting up web.goon.org.
It turns out, by the way, that while saying "web" beats the hell out of saying "www," typing www is much easier. Since one is far more likely to type a URL than read it aloud to somebody, www may make more sense after all.
- From: Ellen Fuhrer <Ellen_Fuhrer@aigtc.com>
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 13:28:35 -0400
Subject: WWWWWWWWWW ad infinitim!I noticed in your website that someone criticized "web" as being harder to type than "www" but I disagree. As a fellow pianist, you'll have to agree that the correct fingering for the w is that awful 4th finger which gives us all a hard time, strengthwise, and dextrally.
- From: Ken Arnold - SMI Software Development <Ken.Arnold@East.Sun.COM>
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 -0500
100 % 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.
Coverage in various media
(Why is it so rare for me to be contacted when someone runs a piece on WebDot?)
Wednesday, June 10, 1998
The Times (London) - Interface - Designer urges world to change addresses
Wednesday, June 10, 1998
Lycos main page - flash - A Battle Against WWW - Way, way, way too hard to pronounce
Monday, June 8, 1998
The Saint Petersburg Times - Let's Save Our Breath with 'web,' not 'www' by Howard Troxler
Sunday, June 7, 1998
The Contra Costa Times Hot CoCo - Tech@Times - World Wide Whatchamacallit?
a reprint of the NY Times article
Monday, June 1, 1998
The Arizona Daily Star - StarTech - The Net page - Californian's had it with `www'
a reprint of the NY Times article
Sunday, May 31, 1998
NPR radio program, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me
Sunday, May 31, 1998
San Jose Mercury News Sunday Computing section - War Against WWW - Los Altos man pushes for use of 'web-dot'
has a reprint of the NY Times article
Thursday, May 28, 1998
Scripting News - News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community
has an unadorned link to the NY Times article
Thursday, May 28, 1998
Good Morning Silicon Valley mentions the New York Times article
Dub-dub-dub dot ez2use dot net: Do today's computers have to be hard to use? asks the New York Times (registration required). No, no and no. While we're on that site, take a look at one man's mission to un-twist the tongues of netizens by substituting "www" with "web" in URLs.
Thursday, May 28, 1998
The New York Times - "Circuits" -Wanted: Web-Site Addresses That Won't Twist the Tongue
A short article by Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell.
Don't miss this wonderful article she wrote:
dear author, for salon
what happened when literary novelist vikram chandra put his email address on his booksSaturday, May 23, 1998
WEB WANDERER'S WORLD - weird, warped, whimsical, wacky, and wretched web wonderlands
A bunch of fun links
Monday, May 18, 1998
TBTF for 5/18/98: Unpronounceable - Yadda-yadda, wack-wack, and other oddities
Tasty Bits from the Technology Front - Don't miss this. It has some funny quotes on pronoucing techno-*:/@#! He even used the logo!
Saturday, October 25, 1997
New Scientist magazine, Letters section
Their webmaster saw my WebDot propaganda on a the élite email list mentioned below and forwarded it to the editor.
Tuesday, October 21, 1997
San Francisco Chronicle - Tom Abate's "Digital Bay" column
Early October, 1997
An elite moderated email list that wishes to remain silent.
Saturday, September 27, 1997
Posted on alt.www.webmaster
Friday, September 26, 1997
Keith Bostic's "Nev Dull" mailing list
Friday, September 26, 1997
0xdeadbeef
A humor/technobabble/whatever mailing list
Monday, September 22, 1997
CNET Rumors page
Another chap has taken it upon himself to rid the Web of the letter "W." Well, not quite, but Dave Yost is mad as hell and won't take the dub-dub-dub anymore. He wants to replace the "www" in everyone's URL with "web," which rolls off the tongue much more mellifluously. Before you call him a nutter, say "wuh-wuh-wuh" ten times fast. Go on, I'll wait.
Convinced, smarty-pants? Now if we can just convince Yost to slim down the name of his crusade, "The Campaign To Replace 'double-you double-you double-you dot' With 'web-dot.'"
Thursday, September 18, 1997
Fun_People mailing list archived copy
It went out on Peter Langston's mailing list of mostly fun stuff for fun people.
Others?
If you've seen or heard mention of the WebDot campaign elsewhere, please let me know.
History
The earliest webdot site I've heard from is web.mit.edu, also known as mit.edu, in summer, 1993 (see the story on this).
The earliest www-dot site I've heard from is www.mit.edu, in 12/92 or 1/93 (see the story on this).
If you know of earlier examples, please let me know.
Extra-techie details
You could dispense with the prefix altogether and use the simpler "YourHost.com". If this seems undesirable because you need to split off your http traffic to a different host or set of hosts, there are various wiggie solutions. [If anyone knows of a good link to information about this, please let me know, and I'll put it here.]
Feel free to use the 
graphic (especially if you link it to this page).
http://Yost.com/Misc/webdot-old.html - this page
1997-09-14 Created
1999-09-21 Modified
1999-11-16 Modified cosmetically