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

He has also said he'd leave out the colon.

I thought the whole point was to distinguish the protocol from the path. I can't believe the BBC article completely misses that forward slashes are used for paths in Unix (and acceptable in most other OSes instead of back slashes).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_%28computing%29

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881278

http://searchyc.com/berners?sort=by_date