It seems like the de facto standard in the media, advertising, and in conversations, to leave out the http:// part of a URL when referring to a website.
For example, a truck doing grocery home delivery might have written on the side of it “Woolworths Home Shop — www.homeshop.com.au”. Or a radio announcer might say “For more information, go to abc.net.au/triplej.” (pronounced as ABC dot net dot AU slash triple J)
In both examples, they are actually ambiguous as to what they refer to. Okay, Woolworths has a domain name called “www.homeshop.com.au”. Water is wet.
Let me go to abc.net.au/triplej. Um, I just looked for it in my street directory, and there is no such suburb called abc.net.au/triplej.
Okay, I’m not that dumb. I know it’s got something to do with the computer, so I paste www.homeshop.com.au into my Gopher browser. What? Woolworths doesn’t support Gopher? Damn, you didn’t tell me that.
You should have told me you only work with HTTP in the first place. That’s why you need the http://. How should my computer know not to access it via FTP, Gopher, IRC, etc.?
I know my saying this is falling on deaf ears, but I wish people would print the http:// part of URLs more often. After all, it’s a Universal Resource Locator, and HTTP isn’t the only protocol in the universe.
Because proper HTML based browsers understand what is intended as a default action and can translate it to the right protocol requirement. It is the FTP and like requests that need to be specific.
Why is this, because the majority of all people browsing are doing so via Ie or firefox
Death to http://...
Recently Jeremy Visser blogged about his frustrations that the http:// URI being dropped off addresses.
To be honest, I don’t see it as a big problem.
Like it or not the Joe Six-Pack uses the following apps in this order:
Web BrowserEmail Clie…
Yeah, I do know that, and I am guilty of omitting the protocol myself.
I took that point of view in my writing to stir up some thought about the matter.
[...] so I, for a while like Jeremy have lamented the disappearance of the URI scheme (the “http://” bit ) in URLs when seen in [...]
People paste http://www.homeshop.com.au into their browser. And it is not Gopher. And if this browser is somewhat modern it’ll be able to make a distinction between FTP and HTTP. And otherwise they won’t ever see FTP. And that still doesn’t make a whole lot of difference ’cause the people who want to make use of FTP know how to do that (or will find someone who knows).
The upside is: for people who do know how these things work this only makes stuff easier. Really, I’m my line of business (ICT) it is also a de facto.
http:// and www. are not necessary anymore.
Now that you mention the FTP, I have a gripe about that.
My ISP’s FTP server is
http://ftp.iinet.net.au. I frequently type “http://ftp.iinet.net.au” into my browser, expecting it to go tohttp://ftp.iinet.net.au/, but Firefox sees the “ftp” on the beginning of it and goes to “ftp
/ftp.iinet.net.au/” instead.Most annoying.