Web inventor says forward slashes 'a mistake'

WASHINGTON, USA: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, confessed that the // (forward slashes) in a web address were actually "unnecessary".

He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said.

Sir Tim admitted that when he devised the web, almost 30 years ago, he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause "so much hassle". “The prefix "http://" ended up just making people overuse their index finger, waste time and use more paper.”

“When I designed the URL, this thing which starts http://, the slash, slash was to indicate that we are actually starting at the top, not starting down at the next slash.' But the address could have worked perfectly well without the two extra unnecessary keystrokes,” The Daily Mail quoted him as saying during a symposium.

Sir Tim is currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium and he is also working with the UK government to help open up access to government data.