Of www. and not-www.

For a couple of years around 2008, it was briefly totally unhip to use www. in your domain. Like, total luddite heretical uncoolness. All the RoR cool kids were even adding apache nginx rules to redirect www.example.com to example.com. "Www" was that bad. Anathema. A relic.

People were really passionate about that, too. 'What do you need www. for? It's stupid!! It serves no purpose and must be eradicated!' Sure, you don't really need it. To add insult to injury, "www." makes you type four things you don't need! The horror!

Never mind that most mainstream browsers have had keyboard shortcuts for years that let you just type "example" and fill-in "www." and ".com" (and other TLDs) for you. I never, ever type "www.", and neither should you.

Today it became apparent those shortcuts aren't well known, so as a PSA I'm making a handy list below. It should work in Firefox and Chrome, and possibly Internet Explorer, but notably the bearded nerds who really really care about eliminating "www." tend not to use IE so much, for some reason. Here goes.

"example" + ctrl-enter = www.example.com
"example" + shift-enter = www.example.net
"example" + ctrl-shift-enter = www.example.org
"example" + cmd-shift-backtick-ctrl-enter-space-esc = example.io

You can even customize what gets filled in, at least in Firefox. Or if you really hate www. you can turn it off entirely, so it never ever ever gets filled in, not even by accident.

So the anti-www. Nazis and the people who don't really get riled up about bullshit niggling details and don't mind observing 15-year precedents in the Web's young history can both be happy.