Naked domains!

I find it annoying that my blog has the “www” in front of the blog name, but this is a blogger.com default. It could be the factor that makes me change to a different provider, but at the moment the blog isn’t about tricking with the blog, but spending time writing on it. So I’ll stay for now.

Why do we enter all these technical terms in front of the web address? From a user perspective is the value of this zero. And the browser doesn’t need it – as typing just “nicolai.no” will guide you to this blog – but the address field will then show “http://www.nicolai.no/”. Firefox, Internet Explorer and the others should help us removing the http://. I understand that http is a protocol – and that you can use other protocols with the browser like ftp or https. But the default isn’t https or ftp – it is plain http. And from a user perspective – http is just “the internet”. Removing this takes away 7 characters from each address.

The next 4 we can remove is the “www.” We all understand that the internet is the world-wide-web. We understand the idea of having the public version of the domain, and then the intranet version (use another subdomain). But frankly – it is just plain stupid. And the worst is the webmasters who configure their domains to only work if people remember the “www.” The best would be if the browser checked if the naked domain (the domain without subdomain) worked – and then directed us there – that way links to sites would be shorter – and we would get used to the web looking that way.