Monday, June 28, 2004
URLs in Print
I often observe that web site addresses are published in print and there seems to be little consistency in the way people do it! I thought I should investigate the minimum web address that needs to be indicated to get a successful hit on a web page. Most people would be happy with http://www.someplace.com and all browsers will add the http:// on to this automatically. Do we really need to show the cryptic "http://" ?
furthermore...
What happens if you have a sub domain like: goodstuff.someplace.com? Most browsers will convert that and add http://, but you may be taking a risk by publishing such an address because many people will expect there to be a www in front and may add one. This then becomes http://www.goodstuff.someplace.com which certainly does NOT work. I don't like to see the full URL printed out like this:
http://www.pagetoscreen.net on publicity material.
Drop the http://, you don't need it! In fact, you may find that if you drop the www it will magically resolve itself. Type 'pagetoscreen' into the URL box of the Mozilla Firefox browser and you get to see this site. I guess it must look around until it finds this! Safari doesn't do so well. It looks for 'www.pagetoscreen.com'! (doesn't exist!). Try typing 'bbc' into your URL box - amazing - you get:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/?ok eventually. In Firebird it also gets there but without the '/?ok'. Internet Explorer for MAC does something similar although it seems to go through 'www.bbc.com' before it gets there. Interestingly, the BBC seem to have registered 'www.bbc.tv' but they never use it in their advertising or announcements on TV and radio. Is this just because they believe that everyone has got used to '.co.uk'? Long URLs in advertising material are horrible, aren't they? Sometimes people make the mistake of including the actual html file like this:
http://www.chrisjennings.net/portfolio/index.html . You don't need the 'index.html' bit! You don't need the 'http://' bit and actually, you don't need the 'www', but maybe we aren't ready for the removal of that yet.
