As demonstrated in the message below (www.sitename.org and sitename.org) mail readers automatically format a www* URL as a hyperlink. When we cite Stuinfo.msu.edu we have to remember to use http://stuinfo.msu.edu if we want it to show up in the user's email as a hyperlink. That may be a minor advantage, but it IS useful. -----Original Message----- From: Joseph M. Deming [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 10:32 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] www. required on URLs? In purely personal opinion I wouldn't consider it 'broken'. There's so much use for DNS these days that I've had several situations where it's preferable to only register one or the other (www.sitename.org and sitename.org ) for the sake of your website, and intentionally leave the other non-registered or pointing elsewhere. But really, it is just one more DNS record that is best added to do both (www) and bare, so in most situations it is desirable to do so. But, take Wordpress (I think it's wordpress) for example, if you have both www.example.org and example.org pointing to the same site, and someone is browsing a subsite of 'example.org' and somehow click on a link that has a FQDN www.example.org the site gets confused and thinks you're not logged in anymore because the login cookie was for 'example.org'. So, to make Wordpress work for that you have to have a re-write in your apache rules. This is just one example of where it can be a minor issue and sometimes just having one resolvable DNS name for your site saves some work. On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 10:20 -0400, Brian Hoort wrote: > I remember a time in the early nineties when "www." was practically required > on all URLs. E.g. http://www.msu.edu, not http://msu.edu. These days > sites almost universally work with or without it. I notice that the MSU > home page works both ways, as does my college and department sites, and all > corporate sites I can think of. Interestingly the MSU Library still > requires this. http://lib.msu.edu does not work. > > In general, what is the feeling out there on this? From a usability > standpoint, do you think this is just webmaster preference, or is this > considered "broken" these days? > > Brian Hoort > Computer Service > Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics > Michigan State University > 517-355-4701 > Email: [log in to unmask] > Skype: brian_hoort -- Joseph M. Deming System Administrator MATRIX/History 415 Nat Sci Bldg East Lansing, MI 48824 (517) 884-2472 [log in to unmask]