Forget flame wars. They’re so USENET. The new way of geek fighting is much more subtle.

Subtlety of a blow torch

Recently Scott Hanselman wrote a post on the SEO implications of URL standardization which Jeff Atwood followed up with his post on URL Rewriting to prevent Duplicate URLs.

Jeff makes it known that he prefers that his blog be referenced with the “www.” in the front. I think that’s an unnecessary three characters that is quite dated. Yes, we know your blog is on the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is no longer a nice new shiny bauble. You can feel free to drop the www.

Besides, your domain name will sort better without it.

And for those who say: But if you hit CTRL+ENTER in the address bar, it’ll surround what you type with “www.” and “.com” I saw bah! If I want to go to Jeff’s blog, I can type c-o-d and hit tab and I’m there. A modern browser is pretty handy for that with that newfangled auto complete.

Anyways, in this recent post on the reading habits of programmers, I linked to a post of Jeff’s without the “www.”, which did not go unnoticed by Jeff nor LazyCoder Scott (thanks for pointing out the jab Scott, it might’ve gone under his radar damnit! A nice subversive jab at the man.)

Responding with a geek equivalent of “Oh no you di’int”, Jeff’s very next post, he returns the favor. Touché my friend! Touché. Well I’ve hidden a little something for you in this post. Oh yeah. Bring it on.

Aren’t we just so pathetic?

P.S. Jeff now flinches if you threaten to Digg his blog.