They really don't bother me as much as having to type in the 'www' bit does.

Mark

I rarely ever type in the www anymore anyway.

Safari and FF will fill them in for you if required (and I believe there is some other power at work that can resolve google.com into www.google.com for instance).

They are a bit annoying at work though having to browse to various servers using "\\servername\c$\..." although I'm not sure if that has come from the use of the // on the internet or if the internet uses it because it was already used in local networking?!

Apparently DOS used back-slashes before the World Wide Web popularised the forward slash.

Mark

Backslashes are annoying! Silly M$!

Personally I have no problem with the //. Using a colon by itself would lead to confusion by having the seperator between protocol and address and address and port the same. I guess another character could have been used, perhaps.Using a single slash doesn't provide enough distinction between the protocol-address seperator and the slashes found in the file paths, imho. Meh.

The referenced article is herehttp://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6872873.ece.

LOL it sure does

I disagree, Edd.
Your argument may stand up in a programming environment, but as part of the web address system the whole protocol-address seperator doesn't really need to be the double slashes.

Mark

I remember hearing him in interview many years ago saying much the same thing.



We do need some kind protocol indicator and separator, unless you want your browser to fail with everything except http? I really can't think of a better arrangement, and it's probably the exact same method any other post-Unix computer dude would have thought of first. I wonder what the very earliest example of protocol://location/object is?

It's not like anyone actually has to type them, so I really don't see the problem. As said before, all modern browsers will put them in for you. Heck, most browsers will find this website if you just type X404 as the address with no further qualification.

The WWW was based on Linux, which has always used the slash, instead of the backslash... In fact MS-DOS wasn't even born when the // appeared!

You can see the heritage in OS X, it uses the slash as well, not the back-slash.

The MS-DOS (and hence Windows) use of the back-slash is because the original version of QDOS (Quick & Dirty OS) and therefore MS-DOS 1.0 didn't have subdirectories, so the author used the / to mark parameters for commands, much like CP/M. UNIX already had subdirectories at that point and they were separated by the slash and used the dash to specify command line parameters, which is still how it works today.

A complete pain on many non-English keyboards! Heck, the back-slash isn't even marked on Apple German keyboards (it is AltGr+ß).

Edit:


Thanks Apple, so, where is the \, the [ and ] or the { and }? And that is just for starters...