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.'"
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!
We'd all be reading colondot right now.
So we could be called "Colondotters?" No thanks.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
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!
Every time I set-up a sub-domain for work I always have to tell my boss "http://subdomain." out loud first, in the hope that he'll not prefix "www".
Sometimes he still just does both, then asks me why it isn't working. This results in a lengthy conversation where we're both saying "http colon slash slash" and "www" to each other. Makes me want to stab him in the face.
Hey, tech.slashdot.org *is* my protocol you insensitive clod!
>>>Without the slashes, Slashdot would have been called something else.
Colondot?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Everybody knows that the parent of C:\ in windows is Desktop. Which is located somewhere in C:\ making Desktop its own great grand parent. What kind of sick twisted incestuous OS are they pushing on the world?
The slashes are the only way I can make myself feel...
We should get rid of all those useless delimiters NOW!
Programming languages are full of them, think of how much more productive programmers could be if they weren't typing all those DAMNED DELIMITERS!!!
DAMNIT!!!
Store a stupid bookmark. Then you only have to type https://blah.blah.blah/ one time.
You should be more responsible than to link to https://blah.blah.blah/. It's got an invalid cert!
The government can't save you.
If the browser isn't smart enough to realize that "tech.slashdot.org" is not the ASCII decimal representation of an integer betweeen 0 and 65535, then your problem isn't related to the URL nomenclature at all...
"Wrong. Please read RFC1738 again. It specifically states:"
Wow are you retarded. There was nothing wrong with what he said. You just clarified with more detail. I bet you're the life of the party and a killer with the ladies, right? Seriously, lighten up. You'll live longer. :)
I'd still go to http://192.168.1.2:81/ for testing
Dude, throw up a NSFW on links like that. You almost got me fired.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
WWW -> V/ V/ V/ -> VI VI VI -> 6 6 6
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
The depressing thing is, this happened to a co-worker in another office just recently--knowing what's being served up on your own computer is sometimes a good thing.
So you're saying Bang is "!", !"*"?