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

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Peter Bowditch wrote:
> Rachel said:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> It's also the convention in Windows for specifying a path on a different 
> machine (although the slashes go the other way).
> 
> It always seemed natural to me.
> 

The reverse slashes on Windows used to
drive me mad when I tried to test
updates for the ramin communications
website on an Unix/Apache server. Now
with Linux on the desktop and on the
server the world is a wonderful place.

The // is preceded by a http: and the
subsequent structure www.domain
relates to sub-domains not directories.

Today, browsers, and apparently thunderbird,
assume www is a synonym for the 
"http://www"
and has become a defacto standard,
which is naturally called evolution.

The www rather than the http:// has become
an indicator of a website.

 From a parallel discussion on SLUG I
just learnt about
file:///home/

Marghanita
mailto:marghanita at ramin.com.au
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202