Dropping the www
A post on whatwg about dropping www subdomain prefix is interesting.
Anne suggested the no www site for perusal.
It certainly saves on the annoying repetitive typing of “www”. But “www” does indicate a web site, whilst smtp.natalian.org indicates a mail relay. However as the web is the interface( the API) one could assume the various applications these subdomains represent are web applications, rendering www a little useless.
This is what I do. With my Debian package maradns. This domain natalian is primarily for my blog. See my httpd.conf . I wonder if a straight up redirect is a Class B or A or whatever according to no-www…
This leads onto a more general thought I was having, about how to setup Wordpress (a web application). Should it be:
- blog.yourdomain.org
- youdomain.org/~youruserid/blog
- yourdomain.org/blog
I don’t know how you would describe a web service or application on the web. How do you know dict.somedomain.org is a dictionary service? Someone has to link to it? Semantic web crap?
I think for now at least, we must strive for a non-crufy explanatory unambiguous URL. I think since Wordpress does not feature multiple installations (at least in my package) right now, so that rules out option 2. Actually it could rule out 1 and 3 too if your machine hosts a bunch of websites via vhosts.
When using auto-complete in most UAs and typing “blog.” in the Location Bar (or is called something else?) and seeing all the blogs you’ve visited I think is sorta nice. Of course loads of people don’t call a blog, a blog. Pain.
I think it is better to name the application solely by the Internet Domain Name of the URL. Let the Path be the property of that web application. See my pictures web application for an example. So as you can see I am leaning towards option 1. But that would mean that everyone needs to use something like vhosts and wildcard authorative DNS server. This might totally break DNS based load balancing and related work.
My friend Jamie via ICQ suggested something quite clever:
15:21 <@hendry> jamiekitso: so www. would be a website? and kitten-x.com, a website ? :) 15:22 <+jamiekitso> hendry: it's also useful to be able to access your root web dir with your domain name 15:22 <+jamiekitso> hendry: so www has a subdir 15:23 <+jamiekitso> hendry: I guess you can probably do both 15:26 <@hendry> jamiekitso: that's a good idea
So that means if someone visited example.com, all the applications would be listed:
- www
- smtp
- blog
- etc.
0:03 <@Xiven> xiven.com gets redirected to www.xiven.com
20:20 <@draq> Xiven: explain yourself
20:20 <@Xiven> allowing both breaks history
20:21 <@Xiven> a page appears not visited when actually you have, just with a different url
20:21 <@Xiven> so i made a choice
20:21 <@Xiven> i chose to redirect xiven.com -> www.xiven.com
20:21 <@Xiven> i was leaning towards the other way
20:22 <@Xiven> but decided against it
20:22 <@draq> hmm
20:22 <@draq> Ok, I should have raised the history point
20:22 <@Xiven> also cookies
20:22 <@draq> but why not the other way? I.e. just xiven.com ?
20:22 <@draq> or blog.xiven.com
20:23 <@Xiven> i'm not using different subdomains for part of my site. that's crazy (try getting digest auth to persist across subdomains)
20:24 <@draq> ok, I have to go. But I would like this discussion to continue. Esp. in light of Web apps
The next day:
21:59 <@Xiven> option 1 is fine
21:59 <@Xiven> cookies can be specified as .yourdomain.org to cover the entire domain
21:59 <@draq> ok
22:01 <@Xiven> like i said before, http auth would be a problem if you wanted it to cover the entire domain
22:01 <@Xiven> but if you aren't planning to do that, there is no problem
22:01 <@draq> why doesn't it persist across sub domains?
22:01 <@draq> the spec? or the implementation?
22:10 <@Xiven> not sure
22:20 <@Xiven> yeah, spec
22:22 <@Xiven> though there appears to be a way to give a list of domains
22:26 <@Xiven> RFC 2617 3.2.1 "domain" paragraph
the problem with vhosts (with a single ip): ssl breaks. but with
directories, ssl works (as the host name stays consistent for all
applications).
http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20040812.163123.10c9e911.html
No replies as yet. Argh. 