::scr removing the wuh-wuh-wuh

[Simon Wistow]

I read this a while back ...

"Removing the Ws from URLs"
http://webword.com/moving/wwwremoval.html

and I've been trying think of a response. 

The obvious being that whilst www is the default on most servers now it
won't be in the future as some other super trendy, content protecting, 
mass placating opiate eye candy comes along but is that really a valid
answer?

Are we just stuck in the past? I remember my dad asking why he just
can't type in 'BMW' in the location bar of his browser and it wouldn't
just work [0] and I told him that is was because it wasn't scalable. But
90% (he says, pulling figures out of his arse) of sites are .coms anyway
so the root server has to cope with that and Realnames showed that it
was technically possible until they got shafted.

Should we just give in and get rid of the 'old' system? [1]

Simon

[0] There's an anecdote in one of the books I've just read where a user
always goes to yahoo (which is her homepage) and types in the name of
the site she wants to go to (with full www.foo.com syntax IIRC) instead
of typing it into location bar. 

[1] yes, I know this has problems with other protocols but ...

-- 
: it's not the heat, it's the humanity