Why—when our time on this earth is so limited, and our attention divided as never before—do radio and television announcers insist, when drawing our attention to some website or other, on including the unnecessary and cumbersome prefix ‘double-u double-u double-u dot’ or (even more irksome) ‘dub dub dub dot’? Why, I ask, do these presumably otherwise intelligent individuals feel compelled to commit the sin of the ‘double-u double-u double-u double-up’?
It should be obvious from the context (“Visit our website at…”, for example) that one is referring to a resource located on the World Wide Web. Voicing the ‘www.’ component of a given website address is as gratuitous—nay, wasteful—as declaring “This week I’m going to read book.A Tale Of Two Cities” or “I’m off to see that new film, film.Harry And The Hendersons” or “You won’t see me for a while, I’m going to the room.toilet”.
It’s true that not all websites are configured to resolve automatically to the correct domain when the ‘www.’ prefix is omitted from their universal resource identifier. To anyone who owns or plans to visit such a website, I would simply request that you hurry up and join us in the 21st century. Oh, I’m sorry: that should probably be ‘century.21st century’.
It is also true that the common use of the ‘www.’ prefix was a historical accident. Well, so was the Hindenburg disaster. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
The point is this: let us omit the ‘www.’ and heal the disfiguring scar that blights URLs across the internet. Radio and television announcers: reduce wear and tear on your tongue, palate, lips and jaw, and on the fingers of your listeners. You’ll place us all on the path to a cleaner address bar, a more relaxed set of fingers, and a more civilised planet.Earth.
SLIMEJAM ST. HERPESCHOIR, MELBOURNE (SLIMEJAM.NET)