13 Oct 2009
The inventor of the worldwide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has admitted that he wishes he had not bothered with the “//” prefix used in all web site addresses.
In an interview with the New York Times (NYT), Berners-Lee said the double slash was a programming convention in 1989 when he first wrote the paper that led to the creation of the web, but that it “turned out to not be really necessary".
Millions of web users would no doubt agree, even though most web browsers typically fill in the “http://” section of the URL if just the www section of the address is entered.
“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,” said the NYT article.
The word immediately following the // denotes a server name. I am not sure that Tim chose this. By convention the server owners commonly allocate www. There are plenty of web addresses starting with other names, e.g. demand.five.tv, uk.msn.com, sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov, normally used by large organisations with more than one server handling the web.
We know that one needs to enter in the browser address field only the bit that follows the //. The browser allocates the http:, https:, ftp: as appropriate, followed by the //.
People that quote web addresses omitting the www where needed cause confusion and can waste far more time than including the www. Is this really too much trouble? Think of the days when you had to delve numerous encyclopaedias in the library to find out this type of information.
Posted by: Denis McMahon 22 Oct 2009
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