Dub dub dub? Give me a break!

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

Something I've noticed a great deal while on my travels in AUS and NZ is that any TV or radio adverts that give a web address (spoken rather than printed) pronounce it "dub dub dub" instead of "double u double u double u".

Does this annoy anyone else as much as me? Come on - how on earth can you possibly justify abbreviating the pronunciation of a single letter!?

Dan

 

[MakeItSo]

how on earth can you possibly justify abbreviating the pronunciation of a single letter!?

Guess I could enumerate about 50 posts concerning George "Dubya"...
;-)

[blue]The last voice we will hear before the world explodes will be that of an expert saying:
"This is technically impossible!" - Sir Peter Ustinov[/blue]

 

[CajunCenturion]

I thought it was rub a dub dub ...

All kidding aside, I think this is another example of "language laziness".

Good Luck
--------------
To get the most from your Tek-Tips experience, please read FAQ181-2886
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[strongm]

Well, maybe it is because pronouncing the abbreviation as "double u double u double u" is actually longer than pronouncing the underlying phrase "world wide web"...

 

[Genimuse]

What's most frustrating for me when I hear it is that the VAST majority of the time, the "www" isn't even necessary. Most hosts set up the DNS to catch both "

http://www.thename.com"

and "thename.com" as pointers to the same IP address.

Just don't frickin' say the "

http://www,"

you don't need it! In the early days of the web people might not have understood you if you said, "Visit us at monkeybob.com," but today it's incredibly obvious.

Heck, early radio (and tv, and print) ads would even say, "Visit us a aich tee tee pee colon forward-slash forward-slash double-yoo double-yoo double-yoo dot monkey bob dot com." Which, frankly was just sad.

(BTW, I don't mind the "www" in print ads, as it does help clarify things, especially if the domain extension isn't a common one to the readers.)

 

[Mr3Putt]

I wish we'd just go to "Sextuple-U".

Western-Washington University? Pentuple-U

University of Washington? Triple-U

[red]Note:[/red] [gray]The above comments are the opinionated ravings of Mr3Putt. As such, Mr3Putt accepts no responsibility for damages, real or contrived, resulting from acceptance of his opinions as fact.[/gray]

 

[Sincraft]

I am SERIOUSLY considering if it is better that I am not paid nearly as much as the .com boom has deflated just to no longer hear the ads everywhere .com this and .com that and .com if you wanna do this/that. UGH that drove me INSANE.

Yea, I am much like this guy...I'm pretty sick of the dub dub dub stuff.

Amazing though. There are people out there getting paid alot of money to be the PRESIDENT of the WEB site. A president for a website?!?! AND they don't have it setup to catch anysite.com. You must put www. before it or you will get a page can not be displayed. How amatuer.

S

 

[ESquared]

Totally. It's so easy to add a record to your DNS entry to make blah.com go to the same site as

http://www.blah.com.

Anyone who doesn't do this is incompetent.

My own company has this problem with some of its web sites. And I've said something to the right people. And they won't do anything. But then, those people aren't really the right ones for the job. Oh well, what can I do?

Mr3Putt,

You took my sextuple-you!! How could you!?!?!

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It is better to have honor than a good reputation.
(Reputation is what other people think about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.)

 

[Mr3Putt]

E^2:

[red]Note:[/red] [gray]The above comments are the opinionated ravings of Mr3Putt. As such, Mr3Putt accepts no responsibility for damages, real or contrived, resulting from acceptance of his opinions as fact.[/gray]

 

[ESquared]

Haha... I accidentally made a link in my post. It's a real site.

-------------------------------------
It is better to have honor than a good reputation.
(Reputation is what other people think about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.)

 

[BJCooperIT]

The letter "W" is the only letter in the English alphabet that actually has 3 syllables. I suppose then, that we are 3 times more likely to mispronounce the "W" than any other letter.

Merriam Webster actually makes "W" sound like "dubb-a-you". Geographic background, even within the US, has a lot to do with its pronunciation. Thank heavens it is not a vowel with all those variations!

Re: WWW
Did you know in Internet Explorer you only need type "tek-tips" in the address and press CTRL-Enter? It will append the "

http://www."

and the ".com" and proceed to the site.

^{Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~George Bernard Shaw}
Systems Project Analyst/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle/Windows

 

[Dimandja]

>Merriam Webster actually makes "W" sound like "dubb-a-you".

For years, I read "Dubya" (the president's nickname) as "doob-ya". I always wondered where he got such a strange eastern european name from.

 

[ESquared]

Did you know that in any browser you only need type "tek-tips" in the address and press Enter? (no ctrl.) It will find

http://tek-tips.com/

by itself... because they got their DNS right. They chose to point it to the same IP address, which works just as well as calling it a canonical name for the

http://www subdomain.

-------------------------------------
It is better to have honor than a good reputation.
(Reputation is what other people think about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.)

 

[BJCooperIT]

Actually when I just press enter, I get a search list in Google. Maybe it is my settings.

^{Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~George Bernard Shaw}
Systems Project Analyst/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle/Windows

 

[ESquared]

Oh... yep. I have the "search from address pane" turned off in Internet Explorer, my mistake. I hate that feature! When I want to search, I'll use my google toolbar, thank you very much.

-------------------------------------
It is better to have honor than a good reputation.
(Reputation is what other people think about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.)

 

[JediBMC]

E^2:

Here is a slight correction on DNS and the inclusion of “.com”. The appending of .com is a function of the web browser, not of DNS. This will always be the case due to the structure of a url and a fully qualified domain name.

For anyone interested, here is a little bit on how FQDN (Fully qualified domain names) actually work. As an example,

http://www.blah.com

is comprised of three domains.

The first is the root level domain, represented by ".", which is frequently omitted. The Root servers DNS contain NS (Name Server) entries for all of the Top Level Domains. Last time I checked, there were 13 root DNS servers. In the example of "

http://www.blah.com",

the "." is omitted.

That leads me to the next level is the Top Level Domain, this level includes "com", "gov", "net", "org", and many others. Each of these domains has a set of DNS servers with NS records for ALL of the domains at the level below them. In the example of "

http://www.blah.com",

the top level domain is "com". Generally speaking, most DNS servers have the addresses for the common top level domains automatically cached, therefore, they don't need to refer to the "." server to find the DNS servers for "com".

The next level down is the individual domain level. The DNS servers for the individual domain are the ones controlled either by the domains registered owner or by a hosting service acting on behalf of the registered owner. These DNS servers hold many different types of records. The types of most interest are the A (Address) records that tie host names to a specific IP addresses, CNAME (Canonical Name) records, which tie alias names to host names, and MX (Mail Exchanger) records, which direct SMTP traffic to an email server. The DNS can also hold NS records for sub domains. This is actually very common in large enterprises and educational institutions. In the example of "

http://www.blah.com",

"www" is most commonly a CNAME record pointing to an A record within the domain.

Now, with that explained, I want to revisit the idea of not using "

http://www".

I am against omitting "

http://www".

The whole concept of browsing the World Wide Web is to go to connect to a specific host who is capable of supporting the HTTP: protocol, and there by sharing web sites. By omitting the "

http://www",

you are not only being lazy, but ambiguous as to the host you truly are interested in connecting to. Main domains actually have multiple hosts with distinct content on each. In our example of "

http://www.blah.com",

we are specifically interested in connecting to "

http://www".

We may, at another time, be interested in connecting to "north", as it provides specific information about the mystical "North" project. In this case, we would certainly need to include the host name and type "north.blah.com".

I must admit, that I did fail to mention the fact that even typing in "

http://www.blah.com"

is incomplete. The actual URL should include the name of the file being accessed. For most web servers, a request to a domain, without a file indicated, will result in returning the default file, usually index.html.

Of course if someone really wanted to delve into the dark world of DNS, we could discuss recursive and iterative DNS queries.

-Brian-
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV.

 

[ESquared]

Thanks Brian, but I knew all that. I just kept it simple because this is the "dub dub dub" thread. Oh, except I've never heard that part about the dot being first. Maybe I have, but I knew that to set up a real DNS server you had to manually look up the 13 (or 11 or whatever it is now) root server IP addresses and plug them in. Is that automated now? It certainly doesn't happen for every request

Did you know that the public was not supposed to be exposed to domain names at all, just like they aren't really exposed to IP addresses? There was supposed to be another layer on top of them, a keyword or directory similar to AOL's keyword system.

This would have solved the problem of who "owns" domains, and all the difficulty about remembering host names and subdomains and aitch tee tee pee. No more registering a domain like ibm.com and trying to sell it to the company IBM Corp for thousands of dollars. Instead, we would have consulted the directory and found the listing for IBM Corp, which may or may not have used ibm.com.

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Every joy is beyond all others. The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all.

 

[JediBMC]

Most DNS servers are based on BIND DNS. Therefore, they are able to utilize the cache.dns files freely distributed on the Internet. The cache.dns file has in it the root DNS servers, "A" through "M".

As for the directory system, I haven't heard that before. I think that now a days, Google and Yahoo! have taken on that role to a certain extent. I, for one, have always disliked AOL's keyword system... even before there was a public Internet. (For those that don't know, AOL started out as a large BBS internetwork, much like GEnie or Prodigy.)

I actually like the free flowing nature of the Internet, it seems to be a much easier way for people to express themselves. If there were a central directory everyone needed to go through, I could see censorship easily developing, as large "supporters" of the project prevented derogitory information from being included in the directory.

Oh, and I HATE (with a PASSION) when people say dubba dubba dubba. Heck, I am annoyed that some people use

http://www as

a term to represent the Internet as a whole.

-Brian-
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV.

 

[Genimuse]

But Brian, while I recognize that the

http://www subdomain

makes it clear, isn't it similarly clear at the server end when it receives an HTTP request (as opposed to FTP or all the others)? Why does the DNS system have to do that decoding? Why isn't it ok to let the server (which might be a front-end to a bunch of servers or might be the final server) just get all the traffic and deal with it as makes sense? Or, for that matter, since the request also includes a port number, why not let the servers deal with that?

To sum, why is is so important to have that level of detail resolved in the DNS? Yes, it was set up that way, but what's the big deal?

 

[lgarner]

Why isn't it ok to let the server ... get all the traffic and deal with it as makes sense?"

It is perfectly OK to do that. In fact, the receiving computer never sees the "

http://www",

"mail", "ftp", etc., though the server application might. You could run your whole company with a single A record if you have only one address on the Internet. Otherwise, you do need "mail.xyz.com", "ftp.xyz.com", and so forth to point to different addresses. Backup mail servers are a good reason. I do agree that it makes the most sense to set your "xyz.com" record to the address of your primary web site, though.