Let's compound the agony: 3 threes are nine! Can anybody *say* www? I mean,
in a single breath, of course? Not to mention
"duh - bil - yu - duh - bil -yu - duh -bil -yu - dot - my fay-vuh-rit-shlock
- dot - com "
The ironic bit is that 'www' is supposed to be *SHORT* form for
World-Wide-web -
3 syllables!!! Gotta love that.
www may be faster to type (faster than what?), but it's a bitch to pronounce.
So here's a pet peeve: who's the great smarty pants who thought up our
favourite prefix to web sites everywhere?
I love 'web' - one syllable.
'du - bil - yu - three' (W3) - I can barely tolerate - 4.
'du - bil - yu - du - bil -yu - du -bil -yu' --- ROT IN HELL - ROT IN HELL
-ROT
IN HELL - 9.
The real preferance, of course, is zero syllables. Who needs
www anyway?
Economy of language, like economy in physical systems,
adores conservation principles.
I eagerly look forward to a modernized addressing scheme arising from present
day URLs that drops the crap. DNS Domains (org, edu, com, gov, mil...) in
the US,
combined with different hierarchies for non-US are already antique, what with
most online entities jumping on the 'com' domain, regardless of geographic
location, or whether they offer goods and services for commercial exchange.
This should be able to reduce http://www.abc.com to http://www.abc
with, at most, the browser padding out the ".com" by default, and the user
explicitly overriding a '.org' or some such if needed.
Similarly, once you've specified a protocol for web access (ie http), the www
is meaningless. A duh, I wanna go to 'du - bil - yu - du - bil -yu - du -bil
-yu' .
I said, http didn't I? What did you think I meant -
"ep-si-lon-ep-si-lon-ep-si-lon"?
(Aside: Greeks obviously had the time of day to idly waste syllables on
their language - kap-pa, lamb-da, al-pha, o-me-ga, ... other than "pi", "phi",
"tau" and "rho", I think they're all multisyllabic. Not us modern A-personality
retentive English speaking types ;-).The one
other alphabet I'm familiar with - Hebrew- has about a 50/50 split
of single and double-syllabic alphabet character names, and no triple
syllabics.
The other bit of this I love (hate?) is that 'w' is not even a letter in all
Latin-based
alphabets! Pity the poor Italians, for example, forced to type the miserable
thing
that isn't even in their native character set.
Ideally, all sites should drop www immediately (a la www.cnn.com being
reachable at cnn.com). Since this obvisously isn't going to happen web-wide
by Ron-edict,
let's at least get some browser macro smarts: e.g. http://xxxxxx macro
expands to
http://www.xxxxxx, and in turn to http://www.xxxxxx.com,
unless I specifically say otherwise.
Finally, if I'm typing into a browser location window, why should I even
have to explicitly say http ? 99% of the time that's what I want. Very rarely
do I ask for ftp or news or some other internet protocol.
So, by default "x" should macro expand to "http://www.x.com" saving
everyone grief.
And, "duh-bil-yu" 's should be shot on site.
Finally, I was anonymously told (by a recently-relocted-to-Pasadena type-
ok, not so anonymous)
that the way to make an impression on FoRK is to come out swinging in the
general direction of RK, a duhhh-bil-yu-three-cee (5 syllables) kinda guy ;-).
OK. Mission accomplished.
Ron.
resnick@interlog.com
http://www.interlog.com/~resnick/ron.html