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

Theres one technical point

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Theres one technical point

[redhog]

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...

Re:Theres one technical point

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Theres one technical point

[3247]

Or just use a different punctuation character for ports. If you think about how the design of URLs could have been better, other decisions are not cast in stone. The ':' also clashes with the separator in IPv6 addresses (which is an oversight on part of those who designed IPv6).

http:org/slashdot/tech/story/... (use SRV record)
http:[org.slashdot;8080]/story/... (use hostname and port)
http:[123.45.67.8;8080]/foo/... (use IPv4 address)
http:[2F00:BABA::1;8888]/bar/... (use IPv6 address)
http:[47.0012.3400.0000.006F.7123.8f23.4012.0c80.0000.00]/ha/... (just kidding)

Re:Theres one technical point

[Random BedHead Ed]

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.

Re:Theres one technical point

[xorsyst]

This is why I always wanted www to be replaced by web. Just imaging saying web.foobar.com instead of www.foobar.com. How many hours of speech would be saved?

Re:Theres one technical point

[tsm_sf]

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.

Re:Theres one technical point

[jc42]

So, what would you regexp for if all you had was a ":"? Normal text quite often does contain colons....

Back in the early 1980s, before the folks at CERN gave us the first browser, there was another notation that was implemented by an assortment of networking software. It originated, as far as I can tell, with The Newcastle Connection (from the U of Newcastle-upon-Tyne" in England), one of the first fully-distributed unix file systems. What it did conceptually was to define a conceptual network directory one level above your root directory, named "/../". So to reference a file on machine X.Y.Z, you'd use a path like "/../X.Y.Z/...". The actual server on each machine typically wouldn't export its "/" directory, but rather would do what web servers do, and supply only a server-root directory (which could also be mounted by other machines by the unix mount command). So if you tried to access the file /../X.Y.Z/some/dir/foo.txt, you'd get the file that the remote machine had at /server-root/some/dir/foo.txt, so files outside the /server-root/ directory would be invisible to outsiders.

This is, of course, merely another syntax for what the WWW calls "http://X.Y.Z/some/dir/foo.txt", but without the protocol field. The TPC implementation made the file readable or writable, depending on what the permission module allowed, via the usual open(), read(), write(), etc. library routines. This meant that all of the software on your machine was automatically able to use accessible files on other machines without any special coding. As with the Web, you just needed the machine name and the file's location relative to the server-root directory.

The advantage of the Web's "http://" notation, of course, is that it allow the explicit use of different protocols. TNC's "/../" notation doesn't do that; the implementation gives direct access via the usual file-system routines, and hides the comm protocol inside the kernel's file-system code just as is done with local file I/O.

Note that the "/../" notation isn't any more difficult to match than "http://", and it's a string that's equally unlikely to occur anywhere but in a TNC-style file reference. And note that there's no problem with adding a ":port" to the machine name with either notation.

I've sometimes wondered why various browsers, especially the mozilla suite, haven't quietly implemented TNC notation and invited users to start using it. You don't need permission from any standards body to do this. It would only take a few lines of new code, wherever the software parses URLs. You'd have to add "/\.\./" as an alternative to "(\w*)://" at the start of the match, and make 'HTTP' the default protocol if omitted. While you're at it, add another * after the //, so omitting the second / will also work. But that's probably too user-friendly for any real web developer to bother implementing. ;-)

(Actually, I've done this in a few projects that I've worked on. It doesn't break anything, and when people see that notation, they usually really like it and the new conceptual model of the Net that it puts into their mind. The Net becomes just a large, slow bus connecting millions of machines and their disks, joining them into one huge virtual computer. Replacing a big, messy communication protocol with a big, tree-structured file system gives a major reduction in complexity and points to a much easier way to do things.)

From the year 2022

[suso]

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.

yes

[nomadic]

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?

to think ..

[Errtu76]

.. we could've had colondot instead of slashdot! I like it!

backslashdot

[thhamm]

Nah. Slashes are fine, but Microsoft should be sorry about backslashes!

Re:backslashdot

[syrinx]

I'm pretty sure they are sorry about that. I can't remember who it was, Paul Allen maybe? But one of the early MS programmers said once that he hugely regretted using / for switches in DOS 1.0. When they added directories in a later version, / was already taken so they had to use \ instead.

Slashdot

[cffrost]

So we could be called "Colondotters?" No thanks.

Re:Slashdot

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Better than colonslashers I suppose...

Re:Slashdot

[sopssa]

On an interesting sidenote, if you type in url /. in Opera it goes to slashdot.

So Who's Apologizing for 'ttp' ?

[eldavojohn]

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.

... it seemed like a good idea at the time...

[ledow]

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!

Re:pronouncing www is a lot more of a problem

[red_kenotic]

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.

I thought there was a point to the two slashes

[magloca]

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.

Re:I thought there was a point to the two slashes

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the '80s, the double slashes were invented to indicate that the following token was a machine name and not a local directory or local mount-point. The first time I met the double slashes was on an Apollo workstation, which ran Domain, one of the first OSes where you could access remote files and local files without special software--it was built into the OS. At the time, on UNIX, you had to use commands like FTP, or RCP. On Domain, you could also make a soft symlink on your local computer that pointed to another server, so you could move directories around the network and the local programs didn't need to change. (I would not be surprised if the double slashes came from DEC VMS, but I don't know.)

Compare syntaxes:
cp //machine1/dir/dir/filename //machine2/dir/dir -- copy a file from machine1 to machine 2
cp /dir/dir/filename //machine2/dir/dir -- copy a file from the current machine to machine 2

In RCP the syntax was rather more cumbersome:
rcp user@machine1:/dir/dir/filename /dir/dir/filename -- copy a file from machine1 to my local machine
In RCP, the assumption is that a path name is a "remote" path if it contains the character ':'.

Windows NT and Novell Netware both used double slashes to denote machine names, although Novell's implementation wasn't originally transparent to application programs. Because of the history of PC-DOS, they used backslashes instead of forward slashes.

DNS

[redhog]

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

Re:DNS

[alphaseven]

What I wonder is why the designers of DNS put the name in reverse?

Berners-Lee regrets that as well, from back in 2000...

I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like http://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written http:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out that www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too late now. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarely used and so we could dispense with the "//".

Re:Saying double u double u double u a billion tim

[Da Fokka]

Saying 'www' might be slower, but typing 'www' is much faster. Which one do you do more often?

Funny vs. Insightful

[tepples]

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.

Re:Now explain triple-slashes

[atomicstrawberry]

The structure of a URL is:

protocol://domain/path

When you use the 'file' protocol, there is no domain, there is only a path. Thus the domain part of the URL is omitted and you get a triple-slash.

I like them!

[sootman]

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!!!

Re:Stupid story

[bendodge]

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!

Re:yeah and

[natehoy]

I use the term "forwardslash" fairly frequently, because a good number of times when I say "slash" people ask "which one?" While "slash" and "backslash" are technically correct, "forwardslash" is a descriptive synonym for "slash". Yes, it adds unnecessary syllables, but it's not nearly as bad as the myriad (and sometimes very ambiguous) names for "*" (asterisk, star, splat, bang, etc) and "#" (number, pound, hash, octothorp, etc).

I do not use "full colon" except when I've had too much curry and am waiting in line at a restroom asking the person in the stall to please hurry up lest they exit the stall into a sudden Superfund Site.