[LINK] > If Sir Tim Berners-Lee had his time again he'd probably leave // out.

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

>> The two forward slashes at the start of URLs are pretty pointless, says the British scientist who is credited with being the architect of the world wide web.
>>
>> Typing in // has just resulted in people overusing their index fingers, wasting time and using more paper, he has told a technology meeting in Washington.

Funny.  I thought it was just a completely natural extension of the 
UNIX PATH scheme.

If I am to specify a net path, to a resource, such as via NFS, it is 
specified thus:

hostname:/path/to/resource/

Similarly, a URI uses the scheme to identify a resource, the second 
slash signifying it is not a a plain UNIX path but a resource 
provisioned to the Internet, rather than a LAN/WAN etc eg:

ldap://servername:/root_dn:389

http://somesite:8080

etc....


In my universe, the double slash indicates to me a resource that is 
only properly accessible in the correct format via the URI.  Otherwise 
it is a mountpoint to a server NFS share.

I seem to recall a big discussion in the early years of Link, that went 
into some depth regarding the nomenclature of URI's and such.....

I think a much bigger issue is with such like the 2 women I just 
overheard at the coffee cart, bemoaning Vista and having to click through 
several dialogues to format an email.......


And just to paraphrase one of Clarke's laws:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is useful, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is pointless, 
he is very probably wrong."

Typing a slash or two is just natural, at least to me!



rachel


-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
    "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum." - Finagle's Law