Okay, here’s another question about pronunciation on public radio. Many shows are sponsored by “The N.E.E.K.C. Foundation”. However, they announce the Web address as “a e c f dot org”, Huh? Turns out it’s the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Still, they don’t enunciate the name in their sponsorship messages, they say it as if they’re reading off the letters N-E-E-K-C. Why?
In my job as a local NPR announcer, I have to hear that guy all day, every day, so unfortunately, I’m intimately familiar with his pronunciation quirks. That’s only one of them. Why does he do it? He’s the guy they hired years ago, and that’s the way he enunciates. I guess the folks at the NPR mothership don’t have a problem with it… that’s why he’s still there.
I can’t understand why they switch between saying “dot o-r-g” and “dot org” all the time. The web’s been mainstream for over a decade now, folks. If people haven’t figured out how to spell “dot org” by now, they ain’t gonna, and doing it for them isn’t going to help. And can we drop saying “www dot” when we’re giving out urls? Thanks.
It’s always sounded like “Annie E. Casey” to me…
When you hear the variations on web addresses, it’s because that’s how the client specified that it be read. That’s a function of the corporate underwriting division, and not a failing of the announcer. However, if the people I work with are any indication, the vast majority have no idea what the www is, or how it’s different from the internet. I get copy all the time where they want me to put www on an address that isn’t on the www. So I leave it off. Nobody notices.
I too assumed it was “Annie E. Casey.”
I thought it was pretty much arbitrary whether a site chooses to put “www” at the beginning of its URL. In other words, I thought that a site could be on the web, but not have “www” at the beginning.
I also thought that if a location is not on the web, it needs to have something other than “www” at the beginning, such as “ftp” or whatever.
Have I got it figured out all wrong?
-FrL-
The way I understand it, there was The Internet first, which has addresses like <http://company name.com>. Then came the World Wide Web, which needed to have <http://www.company name.com> addresses. Now that browsers autocomplete for you, you don’t have to type the http:// or www prefixes. If you navigate to a site on the www without www. on the front, you will now be redirected to it automatically, and vice versa. The definition of the terminology has gotten diffused over time, but as far as I know, there are still two separate entities that fulfill the same purpose. You can have a site that is on the internet, but not routed through the World Wide Web.
Someone who actually works in the field will hopefully come along and explain it better than I did, and correct any mistakes I made. If I’m wrong, I’d like to hear the real story, too.
And I always thought it was “Ann E. E. Casey”. No question it’s confusing.
I thought it was N.E.E.K.C. for a long time, too, since he pronounces it “Ennie E. Casey.”
One thing I’ve noticed on a lot of local underwriting is that not all of the sponsors mention a phone number or web address for their services. There’s some law firm with 6 long-ass, random names, and if I actually wanted to use their services to thank them for supporting KCUR, I’d never be able to find them in the phone book.
Oh, their url’s easy, it’s just all their names with law.com on the end. 
This started out back when hardware was slow and expensive, and different services needed dedicated servers (with different IP addresses). i.e. the FTP server would be at 1.2.3.4 while the web server would be at 1.2.3.5 and the mail server would be at 1.2.3.6 and so on. Because of this, they would all need separate records in DNS, meaning you’ll use ftp.whatever.tld for the first one, www.whatever.tld for the second, and so on.
Not long after that, hardware became more powerful as their prices dropped, and it was soon feasible to host all these services from a single box with a single IP address. However, you can have multiple DNS records point to the same IP address, so the tradition of different names remained.
This separation is now just a gentleman’s agreement amongst the people who run the servers and the people who use the services. It’s also been declining in recent years, since there’s no real reason for it and ordinary people are starting to realize that the extra www. and ftp. are annoying. Case in point: all of my web host’s services - HTTP, SSH, SMTP, and FTP - are all available through the same domain name. (I keep a www. around for convenience, because my parents used to live in the stone ages, but we’re almost past that. It doesn’t matter which one you go to, it’s the same website.)
Even in situations where you really need the services on different hadware - large businesses with thousands of email accounts often use multiple email servers, for example - it’s increasingly common for all these services to use a single IP address and domain name. The company’s firewall knows what kind of traffic is going through it, and routes it to the proper server automatically.
On review, I’ll give you my mini-rant. I personally vastly prefer http.whatever.tld over www.whatever.tld, on the basis that technically speaking, a web server uses the HTTP protocol and not the WWW protocol, and that it’s much faster to pronounce four syllables than nine. When I finally get around to revamping my family’s website, I’ll be redirecting all web traffic from **www.**whatever.tld to **http.**whatever.tld.
So the whole complaint here is that he says “ennie” instead of “annie”?
Wait, so your full URL would look something like http://http.example.com? I have never seen this format before. It makes the second ‘http’ look like a subdomain of ‘example.com’.
To answer Frylock’s question, these days, the vast majority of domains are set up so that one may reach them with or without the “www.” This was not always the case, though; when I purchased my first domain back in 1996, I needed to request this extra feature from my webhost. Nowadays this functionality is almost always included – hell, I’m only saying “almost always” because I’m sure in this huge-ass web someone will find an exception.
Maybe there’s something different about the way people in Ohio and Kansas pronounce the short “a,” because it has always clearly sounded like “Annie” to me.
ETA: Also, I hear the name as -’- - -’- , where -’ is a stressed syllable and - is an unstressed syllable, whereas NEEKC would be " -----’ " and Annie E.E. Cayce would be " -’- -’ -’ -’- " .
I remember way back when the Web was first going commercial and companies with a site would advertise on TV. Generally these were either the TV networks or big concerns like the NFL. You’d get the person saying the entire thing, every single syllable “h-t-t-p colon forward slash forward slash w-w-w $sitename dot $t-l-d” or see the entire address in print. For instance, what’d we just call Amazon or Google these days wasn’t amazon.com or google.com or even www.amazon.com or www.google.com but the entire thing, http://www.amazon.com or http://www.google.com . (Examples, of course, and replace Google with Yahoo or Altavista if you’re a timeline stickler.)
The WWW is a subset of the internet, and its the subset that uses the http protocol for information exchange. Way back in the dark ages, you connected to other systems using ftp (often at ftp.system.com), gopher (gopher.system.com), mail (mail.system.com) and telnet (usually at just system.com, but sometimes telnet.system.com or the like). It was somewhat of a standard to have a machine name match the protocol that was used to connect to it. Each machine had information on it local to that machine, and connecting to a different machine involved logging off, changing your connection, and reconnecting.
When the http protocol was rolling out, the Big Idea was to have these machines interconnected so that the data you read one one machine could link to data on another computer somewhere completely different (hyperlinks). Since if you mapped this out, it would show documents connected to other documents all over the world, it was called the “world wide web”. Machines hosting documents on the WWW were given the www subdomain by convention, instead of http, probably for no other reason than that www was the new hot thing.
Eventually, http made gopher obsolete, and was able to transfer binary files, reducing the utility of anonymous ftp, and telnet was unimportant unless you needed command-shell access to the machine. When the internet really hit the public consciousness, it was http/www that was dominant at the time (and still is). “WWW” became synonymous with the internet.
Websites start with “www” for reasons of tradition and because it makes it obvious when you say “w w w somtehingorotherdotcom” you’re reading off a web address that can be accessed in your favorite browser, which is smart enough to assume you mean the http protocol even if you don’t specify it. They certainly don’t need to - boards.straightdope.com (this website) is on the WWW, but doesn’t start with www.
In the old days, you used separate machines as Subway Prophet said, so the “system.com” address usually didn’t resolve to the machine that was listing for http connections. Since http is more popular now, you can specify in the DNS or through redirections in your firewall that “www.system.com” and “system.com” are the same machine, and tell the webserver program to listen to requests that come for either of those addresses. The “www” is not optional unless the system administrator has set it up to be - and most do nowdays because there is no reason not to.
Well, technically speaking, ‘http’ is a host within the subdomain of ‘example.com’, just like ‘www’ is a host within the subdomain of ‘example.com’. (To get really technical, ‘http’ and ‘www’ are both CNAME records in DNS, both of which which point to ‘example.com’.)
I’m opting to use ‘http’, because (a) it’s different and (b) it’ll make a tiny part of my mom’s head explode when it shows up on the family website. The goal is to subtly change her personality by targeting certain parts of the brain. If this technique is successful, I think we can market it as a safe and cheap alternative to radiotherapy.
Ditto. Never gave me the slightest problem.
May I very humbly suggest that those who wish to discuss the mysteries of URL structure start another thread? This has turned into a major hijack.
Anyway, I also suspect that we are dealing with a dialect difference here. That announcement has never sounded like anything but “Annie E. Casey” to me. The man pronounces it almost exactly as I would. I know there are some people who would expect to hear that first vowel as a diphthong, though. Maybe those of you who have the capability should post a sound file of you saying “Annie E. Casey” and we can compare! (I’m not sure I can do that but I’ll try to figure out a way.)