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Comment by DXL | Hacker News Reader

Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the Web and of URLs, wrote some time ago that he regretted the double slash in URLs, saying that one would suffice.

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It went a little further than that, I think the scheme would have been:

http:/com/ycombinator/news/item?id=796434

And that would have been awesome.

Yes, but there would be a couple of problems as well, specifically the DNS would need some major revamping. The DNS was already operational long before the web came along and it already used the '.' notation.

http:/com/test/www/someresource

and

http:/uk/co/test/www/someresource

Would have both been valid resources but it would be harder than now to figure out where the machine boundary is located.

You can't go by 'count' (because of subdomains) and you can't go by www either.

I think if they would have gone that route for practical reasons the // would have been 'reinvented', and it would probably be placed like this:

http:/com/ycombinator/news//some/path/resource.html

I'm not sure what the implications for phishing, certificates and humans interpreting URLs would have been in that situation either, but I know that I find it convenient to be able to fish the 'hostpart' out of a URL without further knowledge on my side.

Heh, when _I_ first started using the internet, domain names in the UK were "backwards". My first email address was:

rwj@uk.ac.dl.cxa

In fact the first "domain names" I used were things like "lancs.pdsoft" but I think those were X.25 names, and the less said about X.25 the better.

At some point around '91 or '92 JANET reversed all the domain names to bring it into line with IETF standards. This caused some confusion with names beginning "cs." which could either be the Computer Science dept of some UK unversity, or a domain in the old Czechoslovakia.

With UUCP, we used to put machine names in the order they were needed for routing, so in effect it was backward compared to today.

And that would have wrapped DNS and HTTP together in a very uncomfortable way -- you'd have to make at least one extra DNS query for every HTTP request to disambiguate.

People would just end up using a different separator after the DNS part, and you'd be back where you started (just with big-endian domain names).

Yes, that's exactly what I would have expected to happen, with the // as a prime candidate for that separator.

Big-endian domain names would have been very nice to have though, if only because it would have been a lot more orderly than the current jumble.

Big-endian for the 'major' components and the path name, little-endian for the host portion seems a bit weird.

mail:/com/domain/hostname//username

Would look strange though...

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