Software Voices

One of my fellow bloggers, Eric Hammond, makes the point that dropping the www from your site name may be unwise for security and privacy reasons. Another problem with it is that it may make your urls unclickable in emails.

While some designers will aim for short urls to make them not break in an email, real email-friendliness is rarely considered when designing urls. Unfortunately ignoring it can have a negative impact on how easy it is for word of your site to travel. Most modern software (email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, file explorers, etc.) attempt to auto-recognize urls and turn them into clickable links. In order for this to work, the software has to make guesses on what an url is and isn't. In addition it has to make guesses and when the url is "finished."

Virtually software will only turn text into a link if it starts with www or http://. So dropping the www to shorten an url actually means having to prefix it with http:// instead -- a net loss.

Determining where it ends is even harder for the client software because links often appear at the end of sentences. This means that punctuation in an url will often cause the client to end the link early.

Here is how some urls are interpreted by the Thunderbird email client:

http://www.example.com/index.cfm?param=1 (query parameters dropped)
http://www.example.com/test! (exclamation dropped from urll)

It is worth the time to test the various email clients to see if your url structure is compatible.