'W' Considered Harmful (opens in new tab)

Save a syllable: trip-dub.

Actually, I hold the opposite opinion, and there are a few reasons why I think "www" is probably the best choice.

1. Communicating it by phone or radio is unmistakable. Have you ever had to spell things out for people over the phone? It's awful, even when using the NATO phonetic alphabet. Abandon all hope if you have to relay case sensitive camel-case directory paths, class names or passwords. This is why I always encourage the use of underscores, particularly with table names. EM-AS-IN-MARE-EE-UNN-DER-SCORE-PEE-AS-IN-PAUL over the phone just flows, when the person on the other end tries to reconstruct your words, but having to say CAP-EE-TAL-BEE-AS-IN-BOY-LOW-ERR-CASE-VEE-AS-IN-VIC-TOR feels as cumbersome as being a Cherokee code talker, and you repeat yourself like five times, restarting in the middle, pausing, and then repeating end-to-end, the same confusing sequences of letters, over and over again. WAIT, ALL CAPITAL??? NO. WHICH IS LOWER-CASE??? ALL ONE WORD OR WITH SPACES??? WHAT'S A KUMQUAT???

2. It's better than EIGHTCH-TEE-TEE-PEE-KOH-LONN-SLASH-SLASH

3. The best defaults are always optional, changable things that no one wants for themselves.

4. It's highly specific and unique to the internet. And even the most inept people can tell the difference between an e-mail address and a website, if you include the dub dub dub subdomain as an optional prefix. This is invaluable, when trying to inform non-technical people about your new thing on the interwebs. (..."oh, just go to www.intarderp.ly.io" sparks less confusion in the uninitiated than "intarderp.ly.io" might)

We do this in Sweden too. WWW is pronounced VVV and the car manufacturer is pronounced BMV.

That's more or less already the pronounciaton for V in English.

German efficiency at work

i love it. very easy transition from dub dub dub

I think this fits better than 'dub dub dub' for web addresses

Yes but is great fun seeing people say out web address's. Ah the early days when they spelt out the http:// part as well.

If it was realy a bother though somebody would of pulled a Prince and called it squiggle.

ALl this though is based upon English use of the letter W, sure other languages have there own quirks and idiosims.

Personally I try to make most of my servers work without the www. part, it's also a hassle to type.

Maybe we can enunciate L-M-N-O-P instead of running them all together?

And, of course, w's name does contain one of the vowel sounds that w forms (the long u), just like y's does (the long i). Neither of those letters name contains their own consonant sound.

3 yew squared

Well, aren't they always unhappy about something, anyways?

Or slashdot.

F, H, J, L, M, N, Ñ, R, S, V, W, X, Y, Z (and Y is also i griega here). Those are the letters whose name has more than one syllable: more than half of them. In particular, W has four syllables (U-ve do-ble). So please stop whining, English speakers all over the world :).

On a side note, the article's comments mention something very important: the "www" didn't originate in an English-speaking country, so it's not that is "harmful" because someone didn't think it properly; instead, it's "harmful" in English because it just wasn't thought with that language in mind.