I must have heard about this on the radio, or maybe I read it on the Internet somewhere – there is a movement of sorts, spearheaded by no-www.org to get people and webmasters to drop the leading “www.” in websites. When you think of it, it does seem kind of pointless to use www. nowadays. Why do we type those three letters anyway?

The creation of www goes all the way back to 1989 and actually stands for “World Wide Web”. using www to access a website with a browser is actually a small part of the bigger URL or “Uniform Resource Locator”, for Facebook it would look like: http://facebook.com. What happens when you use facebook.com in a web browser? If you try, you’ll see that your forwarded to http://www.facebook.com anyway.

All the work that happens is actually located in the DNS (Domain Naming System) that translates the text into a number (IP Address) that allows your computer to find Facebook.com. In the DNS its very simple to ensure sites work without www.