By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

What Happened to the "WWW"?

In the "old days" (a couple of years ago), all Web site addressed invariably started with "www" the acronym for World Wide Web.  These initials are the bane of public speakers and radio announcers everywhere. Three W's in a row are a mouthful for most English speakers (unless your audience understands a dialect where "dubya" is acceptable).  Even the World Wide Web consortium uses "W3" as a shorthand for the three W's.  In spite of all this, the "www" remains an expectation of many Web users.

It is almost reflexive to put the "www" in a Web address.  At UNT, we made the student E-mail Web address as easy as possible: eaglemail.unt.edu .  But people still try to insert that "www."  The interesting thing is, it was never necessary in the first place.  The "http:" designation in a URL defines the address which follows it as a Web site.  The reason for the "www" lies in an Internet history where the development was driven by a technical community.

In the early days ...

In early Internet days, servers ran almost exclusively on UNIX systems. There were also a greater variety of server types, with the Web being one of the latecomers to the party.  FTP (file transfer protocol) and mail servers formed the core of the early Internet, with gopher as a short-lived but wide-spread precursor to today's Web.  As Internet traffic increased, UNIX systems were dedicated to one kind of server or another. A UNIX server's address consists, by default, of it's system name and it's default domain. For a long time, the only domain in use on the UNT campus was acs.unt.edu. The result was systems like gopher.acs.unt.edu.

If you had multiple Internet servers on one system, there was even more of a tendency to differentiate the addresses by the service type. If you had an FTP server, the practice was to name it "ftp.<domain>." If you had a gopher server, you'd name it "gopher.<domain>."  If you had a World Wide Web server, you'd name it "www.<domain>" and that's how that "www" got into all those Web site addresses.

Now

Now, if you were to invent the World Wide Web and take it to your marketing, department to sell, the first thing they'd say is, "Hey, that's pretty slick, but we've got to get rid of all those W's."  The Internet in its present state, however, did not spring fully-formed from Vinton Cerf's head,* but rather evolved into the practices in place today.  As with other evolutions, you sometimes end up with things that seem to be unnecessary and annoying (like the human appendix).

The move away from the use of "www" in Web addresses indicates a maturing of the technology.  We've finally realized that it's not the technology that's important but rather the service.  When the Internet was developing the technology was its reason for being.  Internet services are generally not handled by one server any more either.  Instead, a set of servers coordinate, sometime each having a different task, to provide the information or service you seek.

So, don't despair the loss of the "www" in your Web addresses.  It just makes it easier to say those URL's and keeps you from having to type four more characters.  It's just too bad it didn't go away sooner.  If we could turn back the Internet development clock, I'd definitely try to eliminate that pesky "www."

* A founding father of the Internet. For a trip down memory lane read his "Cerf's Up" column marking the 20th anniversary (January 1, 2003!) of the "deployment of the Internet." An interesting "Life on the Internet Timeline" can be found here. - ED.