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tim berners-lee posts

Filed under: Web

Web inventor: Sorry about the //

//
You know how pretty much every web address starts with http:// or https:// or something similar? After the first few hundred times you probably stopped thinking about it. And most modern web browsers don't even require you to type it at all. But if you add up all the seconds people have spent typing http://, you'd probably have a lot of seconds on your hands. And it turns out, there's no really good reason for it.

Tim Berners-Lee pretty much created the World Wide Web as we know it. And looking back, he says that while the "http" part of a URL makes sense, there's no particularly good reason for typing the double-slashes.

While Berners-Lee laments that many trees and work-hours could have been saved if he had left out the unnecessary // marks, I'm guessing that nobody was really all that hurt by their presence. But I guess it does show that in hindsight, pretty much anything could be done better.

via Slashdot

Filed under: Internet

Happy 15th birthday, WWW!

Tim Berners-LeeOn August 6, 1991--15 years ago today--Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web with a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup. In the message he says," The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system," and provides the source code for his prototype line-mode browser, a GUI hypertext editor for NeXT, and a skeleton server daemon. From those humble beginnings, all of this. Thanks, Tim, and Happy Birthday WWW!

[Via kottke.org]

Filed under: Fun

The Top 25 web sites of 1994

NCSA MosaicWhenever I think about my first days on the web c. 1995 I think of WebCrawler, the original and for awhile the best fulltext web search engine. WebCrawler's creator, Brian Pinkerton, is now working for Technorati ranking the world's blogs, which isn't much different from what he was doing 12 years ago: ranking the world's then-tiny population of web sites. Back in March 1994, about six weeks after WebCrawler's launch and long before PageRank, Alexa, or del.icio.us, Pinkerton took stock of WebCrawler's index and ranked the 25 most-linked pages on the web. Back then WebCrawler knew about 72,000 documents on 2,200 servers, and the number one most-linked page (plus seven of the other 24) belonged to CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and was a page describing what, exactly, the WWW is. Of course, every page on the Top 25 is now long gone, and most of them can't even be found in the Internet Archive, so the closest you'll be able to get to that original #1 page is this archived version from 1992. Number two on the Top 25 is the home page for NCSA's Mosaic web browser, the direct predecessor to Netscape Navigator.

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