Slashdot Mirror
Tim Berners-Lee Is Sorry About the Slashes
Stony Stevenson writes "A light has been shone on one of the great mysteries of the internet. What is the point of the two forward slashes that sit directly in front of the 'www' in every internet website address? The answer, according to Tim Berners-Lee, who had an important role in the creation of the web, is that there isn't one. Berners-Lee revisited that design decision during a recent talk with Paul Mohr of the NY Times when Mohr asked if he would do any differently, given the chance. 'Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes.'"
From technical point of view, *not* having the // could create problems more easily. For example if you include port number in the URL and browser or program tries to look at what protocol it is based on value before first :
http://tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes
http:tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes
Now if you dont write that http: in browser:
tech.slashdot.org:80/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes
Now the browser would think the protocol is tech.slashdot.org and tries to pass it to a responsible program instead of loading it. This means you would now need to actually type in the http: which none of us do now. Or dropping general URI support from browsers and IM windows and any other programs (you know all those irc:// spotify: and so on URI's). Or then typing in the :80 would be mandatory.
I used my time modem to login to the Internet3 in 2022 and pulled this review from cdweggbuy (yes, that's a full URL because people thought it was ok to remove gTLDs and also got rid of that pesky http:/// for a VeriLogiSoft Computer Interface device. But of course I got infected by a future virus because my Firefox plugin that matches malicious content didn't know how to identify as a URL.
Ok back to the present.
The problem with letting people have what they want is that the majority of people don't understand why things are the way they are. Tim made the right choice,
he just feels that it is wrong now because he's had to hear people complain about it for the past 15-20 years. But when it comes down to it you need some parts of a URL to indicate what something is.
I think they look pretty cool and techy
not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes.'
Has anyone had to do that since NINETEEN NINETY FOUR? Is Berners-Lee still using Mosaic or something?
... get your pitchforks and torches! We've finally found the guy responsible for those satanic slashes!!!
.. we could've had colondot instead of slashdot! I like it!
Nah. Slashes are fine, but Microsoft should be sorry about backslashes!
We'd all be reading colondot right now.
Most people never pronounced the //. They would just give an address as www.google.com where the first 3 letters take more time to spell than all the rest.
No one types them anyways. All of the browsers automatically throw the default http syntax in.
No effort lost. As for trees, well, I think disposable diapers are more to blame than double forward slashes.
Now, if TBL was responsible for the trash heap madness caused by diapers and by Java, then we would have something to blame him for.
So we could be called "Colondotters?" No thanks.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Not to mention all the time wasted trying to explain to people the difference between a slash and a backslash.
Doesn't the same logic hold for the person that decided it should be 'http' for hypertext transfer protocol and not just simply 'h'? Yes, http is more descriptive but unnecessary. Had another protocol came along starting with 'h' they could have opted for another letter or -- if they were all taken -- became a two letter protocol. I mean, if we're going to get into pedantic apologies for lack of brevity I would assume the three unnecessary letters in http are a greater crime than the double slashes, right? Of course, rarely do I find myself typing anything other than the domain and TLD (i.e. slashdot.org, mail.google.com, woot.com) so this has really become a non-issue.
My work here is dung.
There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time. he said.
If the human race is ever brought before a court to account for itself, that's going to be its entire defence. Nuclear power, the Internet, ID cards, ... that excuse works for everything!
If microsoft set the default screen saver to blank in 5 minutes, we'd save billions a year in electricity around the world. The // ain't nothing compared to that.
Would a t-shirt with two slashes topped by a red circle with a slash through it be considered redundant?
I think it's interesting to be able to talk to someone who picked something that affects so many people on a daily basis. Of course, it's a really tiny effect, but very visible. He could have picked two colons or dollar signs or any random thing. It's not often you get to make a decision that ends up being used globally.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
It doesn't matter a rat's ass.
Pick up any browser, type in www.yahoo.com.
Does it get there? Sure!
If you're worried about all the time spent typing, store the stupid text in a document that you cut and paste! (Yes, this will take more time, showing even more how stupid this whole thing is.)
Store a stupid bookmark. Then you only have to type https://blah.blah.blah/ one time.
Get a life.
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
Back when I wrote a thesis on dissemination of company-internal information via the world-wide web, in 1994 or so, I remember stating that originally, an indication of which network protocol to use was meant to go between the slashes. But since, in the real world, the network protocol was always TCP/IP, this was made the default and whatever was once put between the slashes was dropped.
Of course, I don't remember the source or anything.
I had occasion to have an email conversation with Berners-Lee at one time (he bought a license for a program of mine), and I asked if he regretted choosing "www" instead of "web". I was very surprised that this was not something he'd change if he could do the whole thing over ...
Saying "double u double u double u" takes about twice as long as saying "web" so that would have been far more beneficial than worrying about the slashes.
There was a bit of a drive to use "web" some years ago, but unfortunately that fizzled..
You could use the Redirector add-on for Firefox for these situations. It allows you to automatically search & replace URLs with regular expressions. Example:
What I wonder is why the designers of DNS put the name in reverse? If the name had been in most-significant-first order, one could have tabcompleted it properly (using history and maybe zonetransfers of smaller zones). Also, if http had included a way to get _parsable_ directory listings, the tab-completion could have gone even further...
http://edu.wu<TAB>
http://edu.wustl
http://edu.wustl.wu<TAB>
http://edu.wustl.wuarchive
http://edu.wustl.wuarchive/p<TAB>l<TAB>d<TAB>f<TAB>
http://edu.wustl.wuarchive/pub/linux/distributions/fedora
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
At the time there was also gopher and WAIS- both of which were supported by mosaic. The protocol was necessary to differentiate.
Has anyone had to do that since NINETEEN NINETY FOUR? Is Berners-Lee still using Mosaic or something?
Real nerds browse with telnet to port 80.... You should know that....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
In POSIX, file names starting with two slashes are special. One slash or even three slashes mean the root of the filesystem, but two slashes can mean something else (for instance, they can be followed by a server name). You see a leftover of that in Windows (only with backslashes instead of slashes), where a single backslash means the root of the current drive but two slashes are followed by a server name (or some even more obscure things).
So, I would guess he just used the same special meaning, only with a protocol in the front.
To think of all the time wasted on the radio saying "double-ewe double-ewe double-ewe" on top of idiots calling them "backslash" instead of "slash," the web has eaten away hundreds of decades of man-hours each year.
Kriston
we still have people right now saying "H-T-T-P colon backslash backslash"
-- Boycott Shell
like when I open a local file in my browser I get "file:///"
-- Boycott Shell
So the author of TFA knows nothing about web addresses, or else he would not pretend that they all start with "www", a subdomain that has been totally superfluous ever since servers learned to redirect requests by protocol. But Tim Berners-Lee of all people? How could he not remember that the two slashes stand for root, and that omitting them would make the address relative? Not to mention that a colon is also used between username and password before the hostname, and before hostname and port number, so the slashes cannot be omitted without making the whole syntax ambiguous. But maybe I'm just humorless.
Your colon is like a big series of tubes. And if you send too many big meals down it at the same time it can get clogged up. Apologies to a certain Alaskan politician.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Saying 'www' might be slower, but typing 'www' is much faster. Which one do you do more often?
It is explained by TBL at http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#etc
"I wanted the syntax of the URI to separate the bit which the web browser has to know about (www.example.com) from the rest (the opaque string which is blindly requested by the client from the server). Within the rest of the URI, slashes (/) were the clear choice to separate parts of a hierarchical system, and I wanted to be able to make a link without having to know the name of the service (www.example.com) which was publishing the data. The relative URI syntax is just unix pathname syntax reused without apology. Anyone who had used unix would find it quite obvious. Then I needed an extension to add the service name (hostname). In fact this was similar to the problem the Apollo domain system had had when they created a network file system. They had extended the filename syntax to allow //computername/file/path/as/usual. So I just copied Apollo. Apollo was a brand of unix workstation."
> From technical point of view, *not* having the // could create problems more easily.
No, it's completely and utterly useless. I don't understand how this got rated interesting when any decent parser can tokenise a given HTTP address without the protocol prefix. Where the prefix format matters is reliable URL detection in normal text, but even here http: would be as sufficient as mailto: (which doesn't need slashes). There is no technical reason, it could have saved us a lot of time explaining people web addresses.
I think Sir Tim Berners-Lee describes it quite good: there really was no reason for double slashes... it seemed like a good idea at its time.
Cheers /M
I love that a post that begins "I used my time modem..." can be modded as Insightful. God bless you, you crazy mods.
And crazier Slashdot admins. Because they want to discourage smart-ass comments, "Funny" gives no karma on slashdot.org. An alternating sequence of "Funny" and the allegedly M2-proof "Overrated" quickly drains a poster's karma. "Insightful", on the other hand, invites no such danger.
ObTopic: Without the slashes, Slashdot would have been called something else.
With all due respect to Sir Berners-Lee, I think he's fibbing. If, indeed, it "seemed like a good idea at the time," then he had some purpose in mind when he came up with them. I don't for a minute believe that he just randomly decided to drop some punctuation in because, hell, why not?
I think his purpose might have been embarrassingly dumb and he's covering it up.
Was he also the guy who decided on WWW? That takes too long to say, why not AAA or VVV or any other letter that doesn't take three syllables to say. World Wide Web... what were they thinking?
My biggest problem with the slashes is the number of people (especially in the mainstream press) who call them backslashes. Drives me up a wall.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
I don't understand how this got rated interesting when any decent parser can tokenise a given HTTP address without the protocol prefix. Where the prefix format matters is reliable URL detection in normal text, but even here http: would be as sufficient as mailto: (which doesn't need slashes). There is no technical reason, it could have saved us a lot of time explaining people web addresses.
Only way that kind of parser can detect its an http url then is to look at www.something.com. www prefix obviously isn't required, and many sites have different subdomains (like tech.slashdot.org - which wouldn't get parsed as http link).
To Marvin the Robot: We apologize for the inconvenience.
I actually don't think it is! You can (and almost certainly do) use more than one finger to type web, so the speed with which it can be typed isn't related at all to how quickly you can move your fingers. By the time the W is pressed, you should've already been moving to the E in anticipation of having to type it, etc.
WWW on the other hand is limited by how quickly (and accurately) you can move one finger up and down.
Here's another demonstration: see how quickly you can tap out a repetitive rhythm with just one finger. Now try it alternating between two fingers. See?
I call bullshit.
WWW is no quicker to type than web, and in fact web is more natural to type quickly because may hands can pre-prepare the "e" and "b" while I'm still pressing the "w" and I think that's the same for anyone who's done any decent amount of typing in their lives (i.e. almost everyone over the age of 18 by now!)
I think web is a better idea, in retrospect, but I can't remember the last time I typed www either - it comes naturally and I don't even notice, but http:/// is still a pain in the bum to speak over the phone, especially when people aren't used to the syntax.
I had occasion to have an email conversation with Berners-Lee at one time (he bought a license for a program of mine), and I asked if he regretted choosing "www" instead of "web". I was very surprised that this was not something he'd change if he could do the whole thing over ...
Saying "double u double u double u" takes about twice as long as saying "web" so that would have been far more beneficial than worrying about the slashes.
There was a bit of a drive to use "web" some years ago, but unfortunately that fizzled..
the ages when webservers where on a different machine than the ftp servers are long gone. so why use subdomains there anyway.
I have to agree with a previous post. Some people, when I tell them a web-address, they have already put "www." in their browser an happily assume it would somehow belong there and I would just skip it (even if I say: "http://domain.tld") and then complain when the site is not found. I could kill in such moments, especially when it's over the phone.
In some countries its pronounced 'Vee-Vee-Vee'
Saying "double u double u double u" takes about twice as long as saying "web" so that would have been far more beneficial than worrying about the slashes.
If you use a decent language, you can just say "we we we" (exact pronunciation may differ).
More to the point, isn't he in fact just apologizing for unleashing Slashdot on the world?
I guess it depends on whether you have friends in meatspace or not...
There is a difference in parsing something and detecting something to be parsed. In order to detect a web address the slashes are not needed, here an example:
http:tech.slashdot.org:80/foo.html - not a perfectly valid HTTP URL, but nevertheless parsable
Cheers /M
I've always mentally read it as "triple dub". That doesn't take so long to say, and most people understand what I mean by it when I use it in conversation.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I *like* unique, easily-visually-identifiable structures. a@b.c is an email address. If you're in the U.S. you know that XXX-XXX-XXXX is a phone number and that XXX-XX-XXXX is a social security number. You know that X/Y/Z is a date, even if it's not always clear if it's M/D/Y or D/M/Y.
"://", while verbose, is very clear and you always know EXACTLY what it is and what it means--that it's the START of a COMPLETE Web address. If it would have been just a : or a / it wouldn't always be clear because those symbols, by themselves, are often used elsewhere and it would lead to confusion.
Now if we could just teach a planet full of lusers the difference between "slash" and "backslash." People always say "backslash" because they've heard computer guys say it every so often when talking about logging onto MS servers so they call EVERY slash a backslash. Damn you Paul Allen!!!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The slashes are the only way I can make myself feel...
Actually, typing web is faster. Try it. (Unless you're a very bad typist, of course)
if the protocol name would have been just "h" instead of "http"!
Too bad you I can't register the / domain. This page has so many links to it...
OK, maybe it could have been reduced to one slash, since there's no :/ smiley elsewhere in the URL pattern, but you need to be able to distinguish relative URLs from absolute ones. Without some unique token sequence that was guaranteed not to occur elsewhere in a URI you're going to run into problems. Start removing components from a fully specified URI and see how quickly you run into ambiguities:
method://username:password@host:port/paths/terminal?token=value&token=value
The reasons for the // convention for the "super root" in networks like OpenNet and FutureNet, that he was copying, are still valid in URIs. You need something that's easily parsed by computers, and easily recognized by humans. When I first saw the syntax I was all "slash slash whiskey tango foxtrot?", but after using it for a while I was convinced that I was wrong and he was right, and even if he's forgotten why... I still think he was right the first time.
Actually, the double slash is the code for "server ID follows". It makes parsing easier, easier to wrap the whole URL in some other data without losing track of where the server ID is.
It would have been better to use a single character, and not double one that's already going to appear in most URLs (humans are confused that way). Like "$slashdot.org".
And it would have been better to revise the URL format standard to allow a URL to drop the double slash, and still get parsed correctly, if otherwise correctly formed. It's not too late. Berners-Lee could contribute to a browser revision that accepted the permissive URL, contribute to a revised RFC, and everyone would accept it. He's the father of the thing, and we'd all go with the upgrade.
--
make install -not war
well, the 'e' is next to 'w', so you have to push one finger down, take it back up, move it, push it down again, bring it back up again, and then push a different finger down for the 'b'. I suppose the time saving is dependent on whether the overlap time that can be saved by pressing 'b' down whilst 'e' is still coming back up outweights the time lost in moving the first finger from 'w' to 'e'.
In the wider picture there's the consideration of how often errors will occur, and how long it would take to go back and correct them (for both letter combinations).
FGD 135
Actually, while the double slashes aren't needed, something should be there, like a single slash.
mailto: and news: and other protocols don't need double slashes because they aren't specifying a unique-over-the-entire-internet URL.
It would be nice if things that were were programmatically distinguishable from things that aren't, like they are now, even if you don't recognize the protocol name. Specifically, without a slash, it's a URN, not a URL.
Although there's really no reason that we need a : at all. We could have used a /.
http/slashdot.org
And left mailto: and whatnot for URNs.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That's just your language (which is arguably the dominant language). In my mother tongue, the 'w' is pronounced as [wey].
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
They're playing the "StraightMod" half of a Comedy Act.
Marking you insightful opens up the way for cool citations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Experiment
Prologue
The prologue is narrated by the magician Merlin. He explains that scientists living in the future, in the year 2084, have developed a method of sending messages back in time, using a process called 'time telepathy'. Having seen earth narrowly avert destruction from a variety of causes in the time leading up to 2084, humanity's ultimate hope rests with this experiment. These scientists must warn denizens living in the past of the future that awaits them, so that they may take preemptive action to prevent humanity's decline and ultimate destruction.[2]
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
not twice, three times as long!
"The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for." (Douglas Adams)
Someone should inform Tim of a magnificent development: Browsers presume you meant to type http:/// before everything. It's wondrous!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Why is the www necessary in the first place? I think that is where Berners-Lee made the largest mistake.
Thankfully any semi-intelligent web site doesn't require the www.
In some countries its pronounced 'Vee-Vee-Vee'
Say it out load and it makes you sound like a bad robotic voice synthesiser.
"Vee-Vee-Vee-Vee. Hi, Buck!"
Okay, so noone uses them, but TBL's own RFC in section C.1 demonstrates the use of an initial double-forward-slash meaning change the netloc without changing the protocol. This could be useful if you're dealing with resources that have the same mapping on multiple protocols (like http and https). I know it's a corner case, but it is still technically a documented use case...
Uhh.... no. Ring finger for W, middle finger for E, index finger for B. I can do it almost instantaneously.
And seriously, hardly anyone even says www. anymore. It's all google.com or umn.edu, the www., like the http:// are all implied in conversation.
Aren't most people getting to websites via 1) bookmarks 2) links from other sites 3) google searches, etc, etc? And for 90% of the remaining sites (https: being the obvious exception) you don't have to type the "http://" at all. And as for the dead trees... well, maybe if people were printing page after page of URLs, I could see it. But for real world print jobs, I have a hard time believing that those few extra characters are causing the job to spill over into an additional page very often.
You are right. Regarding URN and URL, Tim Berners-Lee created URL format and I think we would have lived better with a different format such as:
[protokol][separator-one-character][whatever].
The parser only needs to detect the 'protocol+parser' part, the tokenisers is then only interested in 'whatever' part (and default port for the corresponding protocol). Here some examples:
http:tech.slashdot.org/comments
https:tech.slashdot.org/comments
irc:chat.slashdot.org/chatroom
or as in your example with slash as protocol separator:
http/tech.slashdot.org/comments
https/tech.slashdot.org/comments
irc/chat.slashdot.org/chatroom
Cheers /M
Just like one slash at the beginning is for the root directory in an absolute path, two slashes are for the root of the network.
The only question is, why it's
[protocol]://[sub].[domain].[tld]/[path]...
instead of
[protocol]://[tld]/[domain]/[sub]/[path]...
But I guess that way you can separate what's a different server and what is not.
Only the file protocol has it wrong, because it's not the root of the network, when you write:
file:///[path]
It should be:
file:/[path]
But hey, nothing stops you from using your own syntax when you write software like a browser.
In fact, I'd love to see the net just becoming another part of the path of the "everything is a file" file system of UNIX machines.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I use "triple double you" when I need to express "www" verbally in English.
In all other languages that I speak, "we we we" works better.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
Well, nowadays you recognize a noob by seeing how he wants to put a www in front of everything that hasn't one. I never used www subdomains for my servers. There's no point in it. What else should it connect to than a webserver? And if, then there are ports to solve that.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Although there's really no reason that we need a : at all. We could have used a /.
http/slashdot.org
And how do you specify a document-relative URL then?
eg. Suppose in my HTML I have a directory called "http", and inside that a file called "example.com". How would the browser know that <a href="http/example.com"> should point to that file, and not the HTTP service on the server 'example.com'?
Stuff that splatters.
Not to be too-o-o picky, but a great many website addresses do not begin with "www.". Now if the author had written "two forward slashes that sit directly after the ':' in every internet..." I'd have had time to get another cup of coffee before my next meeting. But when duty calls I just have to answer.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
But it is faster to type www than web. And you can say "dubya dubya dubya" :-)
:/ is how he feels about :/
A nice name for a new blog site. Maybe I'll create it.
Or "vay".
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
i always liked "dub dub dub". i suppose "sextuple-u" would do it too.
__
Having a mark for which protocol to use is useful, but i think it might be time to review how we do it. Web browsers could safely assume port 80 (most already do). Webmasters should support that. If i need to use the ftp, i would know to type ftp.
i'd much rather dispose of TLDs that allow crap like WhiteHouse.com. If we are doing to have TLDs, can we at least put them in order? com.Hotmail/userName/page.html
i'd rather see people CapitalizeTheFirstLetterInAWebSAddress because itseasiertoread.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Saying "double u double u double u" takes about twice as long as saying "web"
Yes but typing out uuuuuu would be a pain.
I said "say". The spoken "double u double u double u" is much slower than the spoken "web". Some of us still occasionally speak to other human beings, even if only to convey a web address.
I agree, the // does serve a purpose. Having a marker for the start of the hostname makes it possible to construct a scheme-agnostic URL.
Suppose you had a web page that might be served via either HTTP or HTTPS. You need to ensure that any resources (images and stylesheets) it references use the same protocol, else the browser will warn of a secure/insecure mix. Suppose also that the resources are hosted on a separate server (a common performance-enhancing technique).
The solution: <img src="//host/path/to/image.png">
Voilà -- same-protocol URLs without conditionals in the HTML. It works in all common browsers. It is possible thanks to the double slash!
i like the forward slashes
The BBC have put together a list of 10 other uses for a /: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8306515.stm
I would also like to add that protocol relative URI are useful. I'm sure some of you are familar with the hideous JavaScript Google recommend using for embedding Analytics into your HTML. It would make much more sense to source the file with a protocol-relative URI.
And it's pronunced voo-voo-voo in others, but still slower than web. However typing www is definitely quicker than typing web: one finger hitting three times the same key vs three fingers of two hands hitting three keys. Not having to type neither www nor web is even quicker and luckily this is what we can do in most cases nowadays.
Who cares about two slashes.
My complaints would be:
"www." - All letters have a single syllable...Except W. It has 3. "www." is 10 syllables instead of 2 for "web.", or 0 for "". Why do we need a web domain prefix?
"\r\n" - Why were DOS newlines required in the HTTP headers? All those useless \r bytes transmitted for no reason.
infront
That is not a word.
the "www" in every internet website address
Many website addresses don't begin with "www", including the address of the page you're currently reading.
The physicist admitted that if he had his time again, he might have made a change, or more specifically, two.
Well, what's the other one? I'm waiting, don't keep me in suspense here... (Not to mention, correctly speaking he would have done it differently, not have made a change.)
"Boy, now people on the radio are calling it ‘backslash backslash’," Sir Tim told his audience, even though he knows they are, in fact, forward slashes.
He does? Whew, glad they cleared that one up.
Showing them his index finger he added: "People are having to use that finger so much."
I type the slash key with my pinky finger, not my index finger. I even checked the British keyboard to make sure it's not a culture disconnect. The British keyboard seems to have it in the same place as the keyboard I'm familiar with.
He knows that no one has calculated the number of exasperated groans emitted at the sight of a "syntax error" message generated by the grave omission of a single slash.
I've never seen such an error message, and both Firefox and IE correctly convert http:/google.com to http://google.com.
Nowadays web browsers such as Explorer
Explorer is Windows' file system manager. The web browser is called Internet Explorer.
the British scientist who created the world wide web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the web two decades ago
The physicist is credited with being the architect of the world wide web, which was to transform the internet into something usable and understandable by more than just computer programmers.
Shouldn't they say it a third time, in case someone missed it the first two times?
Today the URLs — better known as web addresses — that Sir Tim created, beginning http://www, are familiar to anyone navigating their way around the internet.
And here's with the www business again. Stop it, I say.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
At one point, Berners-Lee had implied (actually stated, IIRC) that the // idea was inspired by the late, lamented (by some of us, anyhow) Apollo Computer's network file system, which used the syntax //hostname/directory. This inspired at least one wag to name his host "slash", so he could say "I left the file on slash slash slash, slash whatever" (Backslashes had yet to be invented.)
Just use the proper tag and the proper things will happen. Don't try to out-think modding for your stupid game. If you post with any frequency at all and your posts are not stupid, you'll have excellent karma in no time. If all you post are jokes and stupid stuff, then I probably don't care about your posts anyway, so you shouldn't get the karma bonus.
They understand what you mean, and also understand that you're a jargon-laden narcissist who redefines the world in their own terms and expects everyone else to conform. Personally, I'd understand what you meant and then punch you in the face. Same thing for "whack", and if you use 'Zed' for 'Z' but you're not from a country that does it that way.
I usually skip the www part, because most browsers append it if they can't find anything on the non-www site anyway, so I avoid the problem altogether. And the http: part and the slashes in question. A few sites won't work that way, but I haven't found one that I used in conversation.
'Frontslash' is easier to say, still self evident, and saves a syllable!
"H-T-T-P colon backslash backslash"
That's right up there with "W-W-dot"
I wonder if webserver admins link the "ww." to their website's default directory as well...
There was an advertisement on the radio some months back... some guy telling you to go to "applebees.com\realvideos" A few months later, it changed to "applebees.com/realvideos"
I admit, I chuckled.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Perfect title for my next album.
Thanks!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
What I wonder is why the designers of DNS put the name in reverse? If the name had been in most-significant-first order, one could have tabcompleted it properly (using history and maybe zonetransfers of smaller zones).
Not only that, but it would go a _long_ way towards preventing phishing scams.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Better than Fullcolondashers.
Parsing either of these options *:// or use *: is trivial. Looking for 1, 2, or 3 parts until the first '/' happens is trivial. Like today, the HTTP could be assumed.
To my knowledge, only IE requires the "HTTP://" be entered if you also wish to specify a port. I know FF doesn't. Certainly IE follows the spec, but how useful is it really to require those leading characters? Defaulting to http is normal.
Let's just drop www altogether!
Dutch? I was in Belgium for a few months and it took a while for me to cotton on to the TV adverts that annouced web sites with what sounds like 'vey vey vey dot etc etc' I thought that was quite neat.
In my mother tongue, the 'w' is pronounced as [wey].
Must get tiresome to pronounce those square brackets all the time.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
almost as many keystrokes have been wasted typing // over the years as have been wasted today talking about the darn slashes on this slashdot article!
Remember, you don't say port 80 to go to Slashdot. Why not default to the SRV record (then port 80 for backwards-compatibility) unless the user specifies otherwise?
Extra complexity for little gain.
why not get rid of the url altogether and encode it in xml? surely that would clarify the problem of figuring out what website the user wants to go to
Well, it would at least make it very easy to provide a clear-cut place to identify the port number... ...And don't call me Shirley. (Damn, that joke sucks in text... Can we all move over to a truly phonetic alphabet so I can do the "Shirley" joke online?)
Bow-ties are cool.
Damn, dude. You just slashdotted localhost.
Don't worry, the HTTP serving duties for localhost are distributed over the whole internet.
Bow-ties are cool.
...Which still doesn't solve the problem.
Let's say that the number of colons is exactly one. Now, quick! Tell me, without using your human intuition of what that address is supposed to mean, what do those two fields separated by a colon represent?
Is it a protocol and host? (e.g. http:slashdot.org) Congratulations, you've just made it impossible to specify a port number without including a reasonable default protocol. This is how IE 6 works--you get an error if you type something like slashdot.org:80 in the address bar. You must fully type out http://slashdot.org:80, and as someone who works on test servers on alternate ports, to me, that's irritating as hell. But this "invented" problem makes that a standard--you would have to fully specify protocol, host, and port every time.
Okay, so do you assume that it's a site and port then? (e.g. slashdot.org:80) Well, that is no good, because how you can't specify web addresses in what would be their most common format, i.e. http:slashdot.org. It would parse as http being the host and slashdot.org being the port (or more likely, since it's text, the service).
Hopefully it's obvious why it's downright stupid to assume that it's a protocol and port; you wouldn't be able to easily specify a host name.
Now I'll grant you, there are probably some somewhat-safe assumptions that you can make while parsing, such as numbers indicate a port, alpha-numeric indicates a protocol or host. But you know what they say about when you assume something, right? Such assumptions only serve to needlessly limit the domain (no pun intended) of legal protocol, host, and/or port specifications.
I'm not saying that there's not a better way. But one thing is for certain; the GP is not making up a problem out of thin air. It would take some serious thought to come up with a sensible scheme that allows both reasonable defaults and unambiguous specification of the fields. While the current scheme might cost a few keystrokes here and there and there might be room for improvement, it certainly accomplishes those goals pretty well.
I've always mentally read it as "triple dub". That doesn't take so long to say, and most people understand what I mean by it when I use it in conversation.
That's... interesting. Do you always "hear voices" while mentally reading? I find I frequently don't realize I don't know how to pronounce a word until the first time I try to use it in spoken conversation. When reading text, it simply doesn't come up how it "sounds"...
Then again, apparently I'm strange. People talk about whether someone can think in another language or not, as if it requires greater aptitude to think in another language rather than merely speak it, whereas I point out it's a necessary prerequisite to be able to think it in order to speak it. But I'm told they're talking about "just thinking" rather than thinking about what you're going to say -- in which case, I don't use any language at all, I just think thoughts. I only think words in a language when I'm thinking about speaking. If I'm thinking about water, I use neither the word "water" or "agua" in my head, which words to use only comes up when I'm thinking about how to articulate my thoughts. I can't imagine how slow it would be to actually think in a language, native or not.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Just do what everyone else does, and say 'dub dub dub'.
Well, no, the point I was trying to make is that we need two different chars.
One to separate the protocol and path in a URL, and one to separate out the protocol and the other path (That I don't know the name of) in a URN.
Right now, the different is that URLs have a :// and URNs just have a :. But instead, URLs could have a / or a $ or whatever, leaving the single : for URNs.
Or we could have done it the other way, with a single colon for URLs, and something else for URNs.
Of course, it's too late now.
The real stupidity, of course, wasn't this, it was using 'www' as the prefix for websites. WWW, the only acronym in existence that has three times as many syllables to pronounce as the actual words it replaced. Why the hell we couldn't use 'web' I don't know.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Well, the obvious solution is to require any relative path with a directory in it to start with a ./, if it didn't already start with ../
It's worth pointing out that, right now, colons, are legal characters in URL. But relatively attempting to access a page named blah:blah.txt will not, in fact, actually work right.
And heaven forbid if the page is named mailto:blah@blah.txt, which, is perfectly correct if you access it like http://example.com/mailto:blah@blah.txt. Yes, both @ and : are allowed in the path part of a http URL. (Heh, in preview those links actually work, proving my point.) This file is obviously quite impossible to refer to relatively unless you make the link something like ./mailto:blah@blah.txt
So, yeah, if we used http/example.com/, we'd need to either change relative links or absolute links...but we needed to do that under the existing scheme, too. And ended up mostly ignoring it, and thus we have filenames that can be mistaken for URIs and you don't want to refer to relatively. We could do the same with relative links, requiring them to start with a ./ or a ../
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"www." - All letters have a single syllable...Except W. It has 3.
In English.
In other languages, 'www' can come out quite smoothly, since the 'w' is pronounced as a 'v' in English.
Hearing commercials giving a URL starting "v v v ..." is quite cool :) Kind of makes you think "v v vooom!"
Also, many English speakers are now pronouncing 'w' (in the context of 'www') as 'dub', thus 'www' becomes 'dubdubdub' which just sounds extremely dumb.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
We could very easily overcome the tragedy of the slashes if only we would agree to lose the totally usless www. that most websites still advertise. What's wrong with encouraging users to enter a simple http://example.com/ rather than insisting on http://www.example.com/ ?
but if you type an address into a web browser, it's not a great leap to decide that the default should be http on port 80.
And then where would all of us be? Posting our witty remarks on the Dot discussion system.
Have gnu, will travel.
Had he not used them, a whole lot of O.J. Simpson web site jokes would not have possible.
Well, WWW was the acronym for his project, "World-Wide Web". He shouldn't feel any remorse for choosing that name as there is really nothing that forces an administrator to use "www.example.com" for the hostname of their web server. They can just as easily call it "web.example.com". I always assumed that the first web admins simply used "www" when setting up their systems because it was convention at the time. They didn't realize what a bad idea it was until they had to speak their URL out loud. (I've done that lots of times with various project/file/function names.) By the time the web went global and became a household name, everyone was using "www" to indicate the web server hostnames because that was the de facto standard.
It's far from the worst technology mistake that's ever been propagated, though. Maybe 30 years from now something else will make the web obsolete and we'll be talking fondly of all the "http://" and "www" quirks that our old web used to have.
Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years
The two sets {1, 1x, 2, 2x, 3, 3x, ...} and {1, 2, 3, ...} are both infinite. If both sets represent the pages counts on printouts of websites, and the first set contains both the content and the waste due to the extra junk on the pages, an argument may be made that the waste would be infinitely less if there wasn't so much extra crap on each page.
The extra stuff is what drives the finances of the Internet, but it is infinitely more costly in bandwidth, time consumed, memory, CPU cycles, etc.
Since technology keeps improving, we condone all this waste. Indeed without all the junk, there would be little incentive to keep improving technology - who would personally sustain usage of the full bandwidth they're paying for? It's paradoxical. We can't live a good life without knowing how to waste the things we can't use.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
They aren't discouraging smart-ass comments, they just aren't giving you karma for them.
Say I have karma equivalent to 30 positive moderations above zero, comfortably well into the Score:2 zone. If 31 Slashdot users with mod points think my comment is Funny but 31 others think it's Overrated, my karma is down to -1, meaning I now post at Score:0. Threatening a Funny vs. Overrated mod battle that can quickly drain karma looks a lot like "discouraging" to me.
Now we have web services: an extra slash is the least of our problems ;-)
Microsoft chose backslash, in particular a double backslash \\ to indicate a hostname. I don't know the origins of this decision, but it makes sense in a number of ways instead of using :// to seperate protocol from domain path. (Scarily) we could have had internet with \\slashdot.org\story\09\10\14\1219215\Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Glad-About-the-Slashes
:// kludge since backslashes are not used commonly in text in the way colons and slashes are. Yet somehow I don't pine for this alternate destiny.
This would make it markedly easier to pick out URLs in text, requiring no
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Some people just say "dub dub dub" or "wuh wuh wuh", which admittedly is still longer than saying "web" but it's not really that bad.
More irritating is people who think *everything* on the Internet starts with www., including their own e-mail addresses.
Your keyboard should have a http://www./ key.
Squirrel!
Screw those stupid slashes; you don't need to write those out anyway. What I want to know is who the hell came up with prefixing web addresses with www.
I can imagine it might have made sense for early networks whose "domain names" actually named "domains" with multiple hosts, were a single host might have been the webserver. But pure web names? Or even names with multiple additional services like google.com?
WWW is the single biggest evolutionary baggage in the transition from physical domain hierarchies to logical names.
It's not uncommon to use "dub dub dub", or for those who want to avoid sounding like boy scouts, some people still regularly use "world wide web".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
How is removing "//" going to save paper? I doubt anyone has ever gone onto a second page because of 2 extra characters in a URL.
We all know that W is pronounced "double-you" or UU (in other languages it's pronounced like "dou-bleh-vey", for "two v's").
However, we also know that "double-U" is also often reinterpreted as "double you".
In that context, it seems clear that WWW is UUUUUU, which obviously means "sex you". Therefore, the web is for pr0n. Q.E.D.
In Australia and New Zealand, the "www" is usually pronounced "dubdubdub". Saves six syllables.
In your mother tongue would the translation of "World Wide Web" still have three Ws?
I think the real fault here is having the pronunciation of a letter require three syllables! The other 25 manage to fit nicely in one...
I heard it used somewhere, knew instantly what was meant, and have used it successfully myself on occasion. Still not quite as easy to say as web, but simpler than double you double you double you.
What is it with that letter anyway? All the other ones are short and easy, why does w have to be so cumbersome? Especially since it looks like a double v more often than it looks like a double u. Maybe we should just call it wu....vee wu ex why zed (or zee for the yanks...) then we can go wuwuwu dot whatever
I once heard that it was based on an older convention about numbers of slashes. Using multiple slashes eats your way to be root until you meet something else with more slashes (or was it at least as many? I forget) So if you're in a context like ///foo//bar/f
and you append a //onion/cow/patty
the resulting ///foo//bar/f//onion/cow/patty
reduces to ///foo/onion/cow/patty
(or was it ///foo//bar//onion/cow/patty ? I forget)
So the number of slashes was a way of indicating what level of the naming hierarchy you were replacing.
But the more general concept was forgotten somewhere along the line.
just type the name of the company (if you know its a .com) and hold control down while hitting enter all the ://blahblahs gets autofilled in for you. atleast it works for .com not sure if there is a shortcut for others.....example would be type google....'hit control enter' .....the almighty godggle will open without any tree killing and all your slashes and dashes and dots will be there............godggle improved now with free instant pestering !
Neither, I haven't dealt with a domain in more than a year that didn't either automatically redirect foo.com to www.foo.com, or had the web server running on the foo.com host itself. I frankly don't know why anyone uses protocol-specific subdomains at all any more. Either ftp.foo.com and www.foo.com are the same machine or they aren't. If they are, then there's no reason to have the subdomains because the machine is already listening on ports 21 and 80. If they aren't the same machine, then at best only the ftp host needs a subdomain, because everyone expects foo.com to serve port 80.
(However, 'web' is faster to type because I can use three fingers to do it almost simultaneously, but 'www' has to be hit by the same finger three times. ;-) )
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
This html works.
base href=http://>
body background=//www.w3schools.com/graphics/images/back/sky6.jpg>
img src=//www.w3schools.com/images/stickman.gif>
img src=http://www.w3schools.com/images/stickman.gif>
But it brakes all relative paths. So it doesnt automatically saves Bytes
everywhere.
Saying 'www' might be slower, but typing 'www' is much faster. Which one do you do more often?
I spent several years working tech support over the phones. I can say quite honestly that in any given 6 month period I actually typed "www" only a handful of times, usually when checking to see if a site admin forgot to setup redirect from x.com to www.x.com. But I had to spit out that annoying "www" and then "no ma'am, that's double-you double-you double-you".
On a side note, it's faster for me to type www than web but then again I played piano for years so using my left ring finger to hammer it is pretty easy.
Although of course "http:" would be considered the protocol indicator, IMHO "http://" is more effective visually as a seperator/prefix. That particular slash is also the one used in directory names on UNIX systems as well, so it is consistent with any other slashes which you're likely to put, later in a URL.
It's only really annoying because of its' location on most people's keyboards, I suspect; although some Windows users hate typing URLs of any length, I'm aware.
Yes, it would be 'Wereld Wijde Web' but I can't remember the last time someone said that out loud :-)
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Yep, good guess.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
On the subject of slashes, and the internet, I got curious and typed /. into google search. It returned with 0 results. What's up with that?
I've never minded the slashes and to be fair http:slashdot.com just isn't as charismatic. however, that said. and this probably extends beyond his scope. I've always thought that the method in which URI's were written was the wrong way round. I'd like to see it all changed so something along the lines of: http://com.slashdot.tech/story/xx/xx/xx/xxx.html
I actually still type in http://www. whenever I go to a site. When I started using it back in '94 that was required, and now it's still needed if you want to use a non-standard port on some browsers. I just found it easier to keep using http://www, because then I don't have to worry about whatever browser I'm using misinterpreting it, or misconfigured DNS sending me to the wrong/no site.
Now get off my lawn......
I could kill in such moments
Me too, but I'd personally want to kill the idiot server admin who didn't make www.domain.tld and domain.tld point to the same thing (preferably by redirecting domain.tld to www.domain.tld).
Anyone whose website doesn't serve exactly the same page for domain.tld and www.domain.tld should be flogged and taught the correct way of doing things.
Having www.subdomain.domain.tld redirect to subdomain.domain.tld is also nice, but less a matter of life and death.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If only. The vast majority of internet-connected machines don't have the proper software installed to allow them to do their part. As a result, localhost HTTP service is spotty at best and I find I'm unable to access it from most computers.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If only. The vast majority of internet-connected machines don't have the proper software installed to allow them to do their part. As a result, localhost HTTP service is spotty at best and I find I'm unable to access it from most computers.
True... Well, slashdotting localhost at least won't make the service get any worse. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
Yup. Am I the only person here who configured Apache with all relative paths and put it on a USB hard disk so I can run it on port 8080 on any computer I happen to be using?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
But you don't have to type those slashes. Nor do you have to type out www or the dot. The browsers can fill it in. The servers can fill it in. Even the http and the colon can be left off in most cases unless you're doing secure https or ftp or something special. The waste is in people bothering to type those characters. In news articles they only need give NoNAIS.org or SugarMountainFarm.com or something like that and the path is implicit.
I understood at one time that the www. prefix was indicative of someone following a standard? All 'legitimate' websites used www, while those who were a bit more dodgy, or less professional, or didn't follow the ICANN (maybe) protocol skipped the prefix. Is this still technically a standard? Anybody know what the deal with that is/was? Just geeky curiousity.
K.
Who says "double u double u double u"?
I say - even to new clients, "dub dub dub" and they all understand I really mean "www".
triple dubya?
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
That's... interesting. Do you always "hear voices" while mentally reading?
Slow readers do this. The really slow (and annoying) ones silently mouth the words as they read.
it's a necessary prerequisite to be able to think it in order to speak it.
You think much faster than you can speak. Thinking in another language is unbearably slow if you're not fluent, which is why it does require a greater aptitude (else you won't do it).
I don't use any language at all, I just think thoughts
I find that most thought (but not all) is done in words (one obvious exception would be visualizing objects or sounds). The question of articulating them is more a question of making sure your thoughts (which you understand perfectly) aren't misunderstood by your listener due to poor choice of words. You knew what you meant, but you have to make sure your listener does too. If you really do most of your thinking without using language at all, I'd find that quite remarkable.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.