Let’s muse a moment about dropped dots

I came across Seth’s post Drop the Dot? and mused a bit on the suggestion the post begins with which came from someone who had written to him. The suggestion was, “… that [dot] com is superfluous, just as www is.”

I agreed with Seth’s response, which was:

The suffix is useful, and we’ll have it for a long, long time in my opinion. That’s because [dot] com uses just four characters to say, “we have a website and this is the address for it.” No need to say “our website is” when you can just use four characters instead.

Let me just also add, on the subject of the usefulness, that dropping the [dot] com would mean very little gain and a whole lot of headaches and chaos. For one thing, [dot] com is not the only suffix in the world. Here in Canada, the suffix [dot] ca is commonly used. Globally, you have the [dot] nets (like this blog) and [dot] org and so on. You could argue that [dot] com is very common, so maybe sites with that drop the suffix but if your site has anything else, you retain the suffix … which would create inconsistency and confusion.

It would also lead to a loss of simplicity in Web addresses. For example, since someone else seems to have the [dot] com for writelife, my url might end up having to be changed to something like billsblogwherehesometimesposts17 or some such thing since there are only so many simple [dot] com sites with write in them.

My point is that a suffix and, as Seth points out, one usually requiring four characters, sometimes less, seems a small price to pay. As well, as far as remembering addresses goes, it is easier grouped, such as phone numbers like 123.456.7890, as opposed to 1234567890.

I’m not sure how serious the suggestion of dropping the suffix was, and I’m not sure why I’ve even posted about it as it all seems a bit silly to me, but it’s a slow morning, at least at the moment, and I felt like running off at the fingers.

Back to the coffee and work now. Toodle-oo!