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Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes (http://)

edesignuk

edesignuk

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Mar 25, 2002
19,232
2
London, England
The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, admitted that the // in a web address were "unnecessary".

He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes.

"There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he told the newspaper.

He said that when he devised the web, almost 30 years ago, he had no idea that they would cause "so much hassle".

He apologised for the amount of wasted time, printing and paper that the inclusion of the slashes had caused.

Sir Tim is currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium and he is also working with the UK government to help open up access to government data.
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BBC.

Damn pesky slashes!
 
if it wasn't on the BBC, I could have sworn that it was an Onion article.

Slashes have never caused me any grief... yet.
 
You know in the scheme of things, I've really not given the slashes any thought or regard.

I'll accept Berners-Lee apology on the grounds he'll not do that again :p
 
MadGoat said:
Slashes have never caused me any grief... yet.
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Apparently you've never tried to help out computer illiterate people over the phone ;)

"OK, type in h t t p forward slash forward slash"
"Is that the one above the enter key?"
"No, it's the one to the left of the shift key"
"There's nothing to the left of my shift key. I have a Z to the right but nothing to the left"
"No, the other shift key"
"What other shift key"
"The one on the right"
"So I type in h t t p z z?"
"No, you have 2 shift keys, one on the left, one on the right"
"On the right I have minus, plus and enter"
"No, the right of the letters, not the number pad"
"I think I see it. So that's h t p p forward slash w w w right?"
"No, h t t p forward slash forward slash w w w"
"You said forward slash twice, is that right?"
"Yes"
"Okay, I have h t t p forward slash forward slash w w w now what?"
"Dot"
"Type in the word dot?"
"No, press the period key. It's the dot"
"Where's that at?"
"To the left of the forward slash"
 
yg17 said:
Apparently you've never tried to help out computer illiterate people over the phone ;)

"OK, type in h t t p forward slash forward slash"
"Is that the one above the enter key?"
"No, it's the one to the left of the shift key"
"There's nothing to the left of my shift key. I have a Z to the right but nothing to the left"
"No, the other shift key"
"What other shift key"
"The one on the right"
"So I type in h t t p z z?"
"No, you have 2 shift keys, one on the left, one on the right"
"On the right I have minus, plus and enter"
"No, the right of the letters, not the number pad"
"I think I see it. So that's h t p p forward slash w w w right?"
"No, h t t p forward slash forward slash w w w"
"You said forward slash twice, is that right?"
"Yes"
"Okay, I have h t t p forward slash forward slash w w w now what?"
"Dot"
"Type in the word dot?"
"No, press the period key. It's the dot"
"Where's that at?"
"To the left of the forward slash"
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Thank you for that.:D
 
^^ Some browsers still search from the location bar, though right? Do they check the dot-com first, or just go to the first "I feel lucky" domain? :confused:

I don't mind the slashes, because as some have said, I never type them. Firefox does the CMD-Enter to add "www." and ".com" around a word, and simply typing whatevs.com is easy enough.
 
never had any issues with the whole http:// typos, it's a fliud movement across the keyboard, even now i barely use it firefox allows for just typing something associated, like " hotmail " or photobucket and it'll find the link it thinks your after, which is usually the correct one ;)
 
The article makes it sound like he created the internet, because everyone associated the term "world wide web" to the internet as a whole. Actually that was the name of the first HTML "web" browser. Just sayin...
 
djellison said:
It's the WWW that someone needs to apologise for - an acronym that takes longer to say than the words it's an acronym for.
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It's macrumors.com not www.macrumors.com. That's 4 extra charictors on there. My site never uses the www. variant. If you go to it with the www. it doesn't redirect to the non www. it just does next link.

Who even started the whole www. thing anyway?
 
Signal-11 said:
Yeah, this is the British spin on things. As far as the UK is concerned, Berners-Lee invented the WWW, or for that matter, the internet.
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It's not a "spin" so to speak, just pointing out the internet as we know it today is down to the work of Tim Berners-Lee. He developed the first "web" browser for NeXT Step. Without which there would be no Mac OS X either!
 
barkmonster said:
It's not a "spin" so to speak, just pointing out the internet as we know it today is down to the work of Tim Berners-Lee. He developed the first "web" browser for NeXT Step. Without which there would be no Mac OS X either!
Click to expand...

How is that not anything but spin? I'm not saying it's not true or that he doesn't deserve credit but between the pond and the channel, Berners-Lee gets more credit for "the internet as we know it" than he does anywhere else.

I used the internet for a lot of things before first being introduced to http via NCSA Mosaic in 1993 (and hypertext long before then, back when I was junior high) so for me, the web is but just one slice of the pie.
 
My first internet experience was on the Cleveland Freenet through an Apple //e with a green-screen monochrome display sometime around 1991ish.

Soon after that our computer lab got their hands on a single Mac (a Mac II IIRC). I was totally blown away with "teh internets".
 
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