Needless slashes – thanks, Tim Berners-Lee!

At a recent symposium on the future of technology in Washington DC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the famous British scientist who created the World Wide Web and W3C, made a confession that he made a bit of a mistake 20 years ago when he designed URLs with two forward slashes (//). Although he thought that “it was a good idea at the time”, he now admits that he just simply didn’t envisage that the two slashes would cause Internet users “so much hassle”.

A quick history lesson is that the idea of the World Wide Web first came to light in March 1989 when Sir Tim, then a young scientist at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), wrote a proposal detailing the means by which the particle physics research community could easily share and search electronic documents. As we all know today his proposal was accepted. The first website was built at CERN and put on line on 6 August 1991 and as they say… the rest is history (see Wikipedia for more details).

So coming back to the two forward slashes… Although Berners-Lee’s confession is very welcome and considerate of people’s finger presses and trees that would have been saved “if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years”, the reality is that nowadays most web browsers automatically fill the two slashes in when a user just types “www”. Also, haven’t we had those slashes, it’s very likely that a certain author wouldn’t have titled his novel “/”, poets and playwrights wouldn’t have had any other sign to indicate a line break and the ‘NetHack’ video game wouldn’t have had a symbol for a wand (see this BBC article for other great uses for forward slashes). So, there is certainly a lot of benefit that came out of Berners-Lee’s silly mistake.

Even though, the usage of two slashes in every Web address is now thought of as not very ‘green’ or usable, I am sure that we can all forgive Sir Tim his little mistake as without his scientific efforts we would not have the wonderful Internet and Kent House would be out of business.