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.'"

Comments

Re:backslashdot

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The main reason is to be incompatible with everyone else. Microsofties knew backslash was an escape character in most unix shells. So they must use it to add as much pain to those people using Command line interface. Also when Win98 came out they added spaces in file names specifically because that will have to be escaped in any shell. But forward slashes work fine in the api. From any code, you could use fopen("c:/foo.txt","r") and it will work just like fopen("C:\foo.txt","r") in Windows.