www.

Tags: websites.
By lucb1e on 2011-08-18 15:16:13 +0100

I hate website requiring you to type www. Not having an domain.tld.-A record in your DNS is only a minor problem, but those websites returning an empty page or placeholder when you don't type www. are just bad.

Example, try typing in your addressbar:
google.com
It will work fine. It redirects you to www.google.com, which is inefficient and unnecesary, but it works.

Another example. Try, in Firefox at least, typing in your addressbar:
ajsfd.a4i
Firefox will first try a lookup for 'ajsfd.a4i', then 'www.ajsfd.a4i'. Then when it didn't find it, it returns:
"The page at www.ajsfd.a4i could not be found."

This is what I meant that websites having no domain.tld.-A record pose only a minor problem: Most browsers automatically try prepending www. when a normal lookup fails. It's very slow and stupid anyway, but if you're going to suck at least make it suck in a way that a browser recognizes it and the user will make it to your site eventually.

Now type in your addressbar:
hi.nl
At the moment of writing, it will turn up a connection error*. No redirect, no website, no information, not even an placeholder, but the DNS records exists. Why?!

*I reported the issue just now, hope they'll fix it some time soon. Poor users :(


This website, lucb1e.com, works as it should of course. The following addresses all turn up the same website (without redirect):
lucb1e.com
www.lucb1e.com
blah.lucb1e.com
.lucb1e.com

I can also create special addresses though. If I wanted to create
someoneelse.lucb1e.com
I can just add a record for that. All other subdomains will still go to the default at lucb1e.com.