As I was commenting that on my own site, I just remembered why I always used the www. prefix (as a matter of fact, I have added it to your url in my bookmarks).
When you print a website address on paper (or on TV, or whatever: ads, business cards, etc.) writing just "inmyexperience.com" is ambiguous. Is that mail, www, or something? Ok, with a ".com", it's clear, but with the new upcoming TLD's, it's getting more and more confused.
You have a choice to print either "www.inmyexperience.com" or "http://inmyexperience.com", and the former is much cleaner. So I don't think the www is going to disappear.

-Posted by garoo on August 15, 2002 10:10 AM

Were it mail, it'd have an @ in it, and what is there besides mail and web? If we *do* get more TLDs, yeah, the "www" turns a spaceless dotted name into an URL, but it's questionable if we're actually going to get more TLDs.

I don't think it's going away either, but just the same, I don't use it.

-Posted by Mark Paschal on August 15, 2002 12:06 PM

www indicates, by convention, that there is a web service running at that address. It's not necessary, but it's helpful.

HOWEVER, the case may be that www.whatever.com IS NOT the same as whatever.com. The mail system works around this, since while many hosts may send mail, but you may only want to deliver to one. The DNS MX resource type lists a number of hosts which can accept mail for a domain.

Unlike mail, there is no DNS record type to indicate which hosts to use for web access to a particular domain name. Instead, you must use address (A) or canonical name (CNAME) records to direct user agents to a particular host.

Think of it this way. A domain may have multiple destinations. So, while for general company information you might ask for aol.com, but for a specific function aol.com doesn't have what you need. You want audit.aol.com. www is just one destination among many. Sometimes it happens to coincide with the domain itself.

-Posted by Will Cox on August 15, 2002 12:11 PM

I don't see any reason not to put it in print, but you SHOULD be able to access sites without the www. I think Adobe is probably the biggest offender I've run into. www.adobe.com - fine. adobe.com - nada.

-Posted by JC on August 15, 2002 12:22 PM

A couple of thoughts...

One reason that people may visit www.sitename.com is because that's how the browser manufacturers automatically resolve ambiguous names. Type inmyexperience into Mozilla and you are delivered to www.inmyexperience.com. Type inmyexperience into IE and hit control-enter, and you are whisked away to www.inmyexperience.com.

On a related note, I've configured my DNS to handle kalsey.com w.kalsey.com, ww.kalsey.com and wwww.kalsey.com all in the same way. That way, if someone enters the wrong number of Ws, they still reach my site.

Some sites use wildcards in their DNS records. anyword.Blogger.com just takes you to Blogger.com.

-Posted by Adam Kalsey on August 15, 2002 01:00 PM

inmyexperience.com is actually incorrect. The correct way to refer to your site SHOULD be www.inmyexperience.com. While this is not enforced, its generally good practice to prefex your domain name with the designation for what sort of service the domain name is referring to. www, ftp, telnet, etc.

That way, you could also have a domain refer to multiple services handling different protocols - www.inmyexperience.com, ftp.inmyexperience.com, telnet.inmyexperience.com, etc.

So the people who are going to www.inmyexperience.com are just naturally doing the correct thing. :)

-Posted by on August 15, 2002 09:20 PM

Interesting discussion. My thoughts are here...

--> http://webword.com/moving/wwwremoval.html

-Posted by jefflash on August 16, 2002 03:11 PM

It's very cool to see random praise from customers, I happened upon this site from a friend's noting of the post. But I would like to note that irony that you do have "ftp.inmyexperience.com", as we automatically assign the following in our DNS:

www IN CNAME @
ftp IN CNAME @
mail IN CNAME @
relay IN CNAME relay.pair.com.

The reasons are, as noted in earlier comments, because most people will try to access domains' web pages with the www prefix, and because we've been around long enough that typically the domains weren't primarily used for web pages, thus ftp.domain.com was often a different server on the network than www.domain.com (domain.com was assigned for the whole set). Since we provide all of these services for our customers, we do have the prefixes standardly added so as to keep with convention and typical usages.

We do not, however, supply gopher services, so no, we don't have that prefix for your domain. :)

Thank you for being a customer!

Some random employee of http://www.pair.com/, the views expressed in this letter are mostly hers, not actually acting as a representative of her company.

-Posted by gwen on August 21, 2002 04:25 AM