[chiefsucker]

A common convention with system administrators is to have the canonical name at www.* and redirect www-less requests to the former. If you argue that a browser implementation should fix uncommon configurations, I would argue that administrators should fix their configurations in the first place.

You don’t have this issue at all for domains that don’t have a www subdomain.

Furthermore it would be extremely confusing to have different content for www.example.com & example.com.

[neurostimulant]

Yeah, I don't like the current trend to redirect www to root. You can easily doing simple dns-based load balancing by having multiple ip addresses on the www subdomain. You can't do that on root domain, you'll have to use a dedicated load balancer even if all you want is just simple load balancing among a small set of servers. It only benefit cloud vendors and hurt hobbyist/small website operators if this trend continues to the point that visitors expect all websites to be served from root insetad of www.

[Dylan16807]

If we could ever be bothered to implement SRV records for http then load balancing and failover could be significantly more straightforward and robust, without worrying about root vs. www at all.

[NateEag]

I also dislike the trend to redirect the 'www' prefix to root.

My company uses DNS load balancing for a root domain, though, so either I'm misunderstanding you or you're mistaken about what's possible here.

We use Constellix's DNS management to have round-robin DNS via multiple A records for 'nxtbook.com'.

If you're thinking of some other form of DNS load balancing, would you please clarify?

[wolco]

Redirecting a subdomain to root should be a choice not forced.