Posted on 10/14/2009 8:08:48 PM PDT by Steelfish
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Admits Forward Slashes On World Wide Web ‘Were A Mistake’
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who created the World Wide Web, has admitted his decision to include two forward slashes in internet addresses was a mistake.
Andrew Hough 14 Oct 2009
Sir Tim said if he had his time over again he would not include the two forward slashes in web browsers. Photo: GEOFF PUGH The // at the front of a web address was pointless and unnecessary, Sir Tim admitted at a recent talk in America.
Sir Tim, now director of the World Wide Web Consortium - which oversees the web’s continued development - that if he had his time over again he would leave them out of addresses.
“Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //," he said last week at the symposium in Washington DC on the future of technology.
“Boy, now people on the radio are calling it ‘backslash backslash’. People are having to use that finger so much.
“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 labour and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes." Interviewed by a reporter for the New York Times, Sir Tim added: “There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Explaining that when he started devising the network almost three decades ago, he said he failed to predict how much effect what he was producing would have on people now.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I think the guy is wrong. The "//" is there to make parsing easy because two backslashes are extremely rare in written English (and I assume all other languages as well). When you are constructing a parser you work your way through a document looking for patterns. When you see :// you know that you have a URL on your hands. Leave out the // and you just might come across some guy who named his company "Harold's Temporary Teaching Patterns" and wants to use http as the abbreviation for his company name. Could happen. Would happen. But not if you use good old //.
NOW wait just one minute...
I read here. FREEREPUBLIC. I mean Here. Al Gore invented the internet.
(Before HIS Nobel)
LOL, I wonder if he saw the Internet turning into what it is?
He could have never foreseen something like this...
Hehe, that’s great!
NOT QUITE.
His work started in 1989. That's TWO decades, not three.
Good lord, now journalists can't even subtract, much less write...
“This browser doesn;t need to have www punched in.”
Actually, depends upon the domain’s DNS entries. Not the browser.
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