Berners-Lee regrets the HTTP slashes

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the HyperText Transfer Protocol, regrets specifying the characters "//" in the protocol.

Berners-Lee told The New York Times last week that the characters, used in web addresses after the "http:", were a programming convention at the time (the tail-end of the 1980s) but proved to be unnecessary in the case of the World Wide Web.

The physicist went on to (somewhat less than seriously) lament the many trees that died to serve people typing and printing out "//" unnecessarily, and the many hours that people have spent doing so in the lifetime of the web.