From an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW:
Q: Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?
A: I would have skipped on the double slash – there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order – in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:/uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary.
To be fair, it really wasn’t up to him to rewrite the domain name structure (X.25 notwithstanding), but I’m with him on the double slash.
Web site addresses are strange. Look at the address of this page:
http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2006/03/25/berners-lee-interview/
We start off with a specific subdomain — “waldo” — and then get more specific, to the “jaquith” server, on the “org” TLD. We go from very specific to very general. Then, in the portion of the address specific to this server, we do the opposite — we go from very general (the “blog” directory) to very specific (the “berners-lee-interview” slug). I don’t support the idea that individual webpage addresses should fall into a normal distribution.
(Via Slashdot)
Everything else seems to, why not webpages?
“There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics”
Ah, but without the double slash, 1995 would have been deprived of the following:
(Of course it’s sick. It’s an O. J. joke. What makes it of historical interest is that it probably marked the first time the syntax of the URL entered popular culture.)
Not very nice to post this without crediting the inventor of the Internet. ;-)
David — I recall the punchline going, “slash-slash, backslash, double-slash, slash, backslash…. escape!”