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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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