WWW - Worst prefix ever...
Fellow usability blogger and non-native English speaker Jasper van Kuijk recently had a very astute rant on the unfortunate convention of preceding web addresses with "www" - in English, this is the worst possible letter to have to repeat three times! It's the only letter with three syllables - in fact, the only letter with more than one syllable - and repeating it three times in a row amounts to a feat of enunciatory acrobatics, especially for speakers of English as a foreign language. The "abbreviation" of 3 w's is actually more difficult to pronounce than what it stands for, the more quickly spoken "world-wide web." Sure, there are some fixes: saying "dub-dub-dub," saying "triple-double-you," or simply omitting the www from the URL. But none of these have really caught on - yet - so we're stuck, wasting time and tongue muscles on an unfortunate, and very unusable, convention.
2 comments:
Hmm, I think the lack of WWW in the verbal utterance of a URL has long caught on. There was an episode of Home Movies (maybe 10 years ago now) where the characters are giving out URLs and one of them is saying the WWW each time, slowly, to the aggravation of others. It was a moment of comedy illustration.
On the other hand, I wonder if saying the WWW - slowly - out loud - serves as some sort of verbal lexical symbol (I'm not using the right descriptor) to say - what's coming up in a moment is a URL and you should listen to it that way, just like "dot" and "com" (i.e., "calm") are verbal cues that we know look like something typed - ".com" and not "dotcalm" - I wonder if that triggers some context for immediately interpreting the next few sounds, just like how a computer interprets http colon slash slash
A lot of times I'll just say "w-dot" or "w-w-dot" and then the rest of the website.
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