I’ve started putting the www back into the addresses of new sites I’m building for myself and family, such as Clara’s and my wiki.

The www subdomain used to be important when you’d be delivering something other than HTML over HTTP on a server; it’s likely why so many infrastructure domains retain it to this day. It was also a bit of a branding exercise for the fledgling World Wide Web, though with the well-known and hilarious side effect of taking longer to pronounce as an initialism than the full words.

Wikipedia’s references argue that the www subdomain fell out of favour in part due to mobile devices, and the need to make domains easier to say. They may be right. I think it was just as much a desire to make server configs easier: www is another DNS record, another virtual host, and/or another redirect. Getting rid of them makes a bunch of stuff easier.

But I think we lost something when we parted ways with our www friend. I only realised recently that its removal coincided with the consolidation of the web into a few large players. We lost the www, but we also lost the web as a concept. Rather than a mesh of interconnected nodes spanning the globe, we now have a few gigaton silos.

I dunno, I may be overthinking things again, but it’s fun seeing www gracing some of our stuff again. It takes me back to those old days when I spun up my first Red Hat Linux web server on our home ISP so I could share my SimTower fansite. The best thing about the web is how anyone can still connect and publish to it.

(I’m also deciding to refer to them as URLs and not URIs, but that’s for another post).*