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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.'"
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.
Or remove support for ports and use SRV records to find the port. Which would have saved us tons of work with named virtual hosts, and allowed us to run multiple SSL sites on the same IP...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Nah. Slashes are fine, but Microsoft should be sorry about backslashes!
Not to mention all the time wasted trying to explain to people the difference between a slash and a backslash.
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.
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
Don't be an ass. Using ports allows someone to set up an ah-hoc server for testing or whatever easily. The last thing they want to do is dick about having to update DNS's bastard child before they can access it from the browser.
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.
Saying 'www' might be slower, but typing 'www' is much faster. Which one do you do more often?
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.
better idea: Just alias the www version and it won't matter if the boss (or anyone else for that matter) confuses it that way.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
What if I just want to run an HTTP server on a non-standard port for development? Not everyone is running a DNS server, nor should DNS records need to be changed so often.
How would it allow named virtual hosts? The only thing you have at the network layer is the IP address that the message was sent to, that's why HTTPS virtual hosts is difficult to implement.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
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.
Because URL is not just for webpages - it's used for other protocols too. Just like you can click on a http link in other program, you can click other programs link in your browser. This can be irc:// mailto: spotify: and so on. And theres many instances where websites have such links to launch external application directly from it.
My examples showed that the standard :port option, which is optional, would have to be removed for it to work. Or it would had to be made mandatory, or the : changed to something else (which would make even less sense, since hostname:port is the standard way to show it).
What's worse is people who say "forward slash". There is no such animal. It's either a backslash or a slash. Does anybody say full colon as opposed to a semi-colon ? I use it as a natural filter against people who don't know what they're talking about.
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.
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?
Get with the times, dude. Class action lawsuits are way more profitable!
There is nothing incorrect about having a web server whose hostname does not start with www. To imply that there is shows a lack of understanding about what a hostname is.
If we're mobilizing the torch and pitchfork mob, I'd rather send them after the person (Bill Gates???) who decided in MS-DOS to substitute backward slashes where convention for a long time had been forward slashes as the separator in pathnames
DOS got it from CP/M. I don't know why you think the UNIX way of doing it was the convention. Macs and a lot of microcomputers used colons, and a lot of mainframe and older time-sharing operating systems used dots, as did VMS.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
To borrow from a recent argument, truly you share the eloquence of Cyrano. In a similar vein, fuck off - at least with the insults.
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?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
http:org/slashdot/tech/story/... (use SRV record)
I've always liked that idea (which I've seen before) because it treats subdomains in the same way it treats subdirectories under the document root, which opens a lot of possibilities for creative web hosting schemes (e.g., Slashdot could have put this story on a site at slashdot.org/tech, but when that server's load became high enough to justify a separate host the site could move to tech.slashdot.org - there would be no difference between /tech and tech. from a navigational standpoint).
Also, the dot-com boom would have been the com-slash boom, which would have been much cooler.
Then you still need to have a format that allows programmatic parseability when the port is required. I mean, I have no problem with using more DNS records for port numbers, but the format of the URI needs to account for all supported possibilities, not just the common ones. That's why the OP suggested getting rid of the port number ability when getting rid of the double slash, but when suggesting to allow a default but still allowing overriding, you get back to finding a mechanism that can be deterministically parsed whether the optional feature is there or not. Double slashes provide some of that, though it's probably not the only solution.
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
Probably the single biggest reason to have domain.com redirect to www.domain.com is so that you can have specific domains for resources, like images.domain.com ... Further the reason for this is to limit the unneeded transmission of cookies. If your website uses domain.com, then using images.domain.com serves very little good as any cookies assigned to domain.com will be sent with each request. Using www.domain.com, scripts.domain.com and images.domain.com extends the ability to have localized (or no) cookies in the resource-only domains. This is less necessary as more and more browsers are breaking older standards and allowing more than two connections to a given host name at a time. (IE8 extended it to six by default, and IIRC firefox already exceeded this limit as well).
Regarding the port, this is very much necessary for development purposes, as using high-range ports is the most reasonable method of allowing a User to run a development server instance.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Don't be an ass. Using ports allows someone to set up an ah-hoc server for testing or whatever easily. The last thing they want to do is dick about having to update DNS's bastard child before they can access it from the browser.
One: I don't think the GP was the one being "an ass."
Two: I don't think the GP was suggesting that there be no way at all to force your browser to another port for testing purposes (at the very least, a command-line option to browsers could be provided). The point was that for general usage when talking to remote systems, there's no reason not to use DNS, and it would have solved one of the largest problems with IP proliferation: the need to lock SSL to a specific port, due to the fact that the URI used is hidden from intermediate hosts.
However, I do like the URI syntax as it stands. I do think that dot should not have been a valid last character for scheme (which would have allowed you disambiguate host and scheme by using the FQDN of the host with trailing "." For that matter, I'm not sure dots should have been allowed in schemes at all.
One thing that the URI syntax suffers from is something that Larry Wall pointed out when managing the design effort and RFCs for Perl 6: Everyone wants the colon. The double-slash, though, I think is a good thing. It allows for rooted URIs such as / without ambiguity.
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