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"//" should indicate a URL

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Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#21

Post by justincormack »

ryanpetrich wrote: post #16
jonhohle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used this technique since 2006 or so with IE6. The only concern I know of relates to using odd port numbers without a protocol in IE (but I don't think this is a concern if the protocol is relative). At the time, every other browser tested worked as well (not that that was much of a shock). I don't have a copy of IE6 to test on at the moment, but what makes you think IE8 is required for relative protocols?

IE6 will also fetch some resources twice if they are protocol-relative URLs

That doesn't wound like a shopstopper... optimising performance for IE6 is kind of pointless..

Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#22

Post by justincormack »

dbrock wrote: post #20

URL detection is tricky because people omit the “ http://” part of URLs. It used to be that you could look for stuff beginning with “www.”, but nobody uses “www.” anymore, so now you basically have to have a list of TLDs and look for anything ending in “. ”. Now that everybody will be able to register their own TLD, will URL detection even be feasible for humans any more? I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to s…

I thought this might be an issue when they did generic TLDs, but as far as I can see they are only selling to registrars, so they are not expecting web sites at the top level, there will still be a subdomain, and browsers will probably not go to the top level domains.

Interestingly, http://dk/ has a valid A record to 193.163.102.24 which curl will show is a 301 redirect, but you cannot load it in Chrome or Firefox. dk has MX records too (I remember an old story about someone who had the email address m@dk or similar), but I think generally having any records for the top level is frowned upon now.

Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#23

Post by Terretta »

dbrock wrote: post #20

URL detection is tricky because people omit the “ http://” part of URLs. It used to be that you could look for stuff beginning with “www.”, but nobody uses “www.” anymore, so now you basically have to have a list of TLDs and look for anything ending in “. ”. Now that everybody will be able to register their own TLD, will URL detection even be feasible for humans any more? I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to s…

> nobody uses “www.” anymore

Except for the vast majority of high volume sites that know how to balance traffic and don't show "fail whales" every couple days.

Visit google.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com, msn.com, etc, and watch your URL get fixed to correctly reflect the local hostname "www".

Even coca-cola.com. You can type it wrong as you always have, and they'll fix it for you to be "http://www.coca-cola.com/.

Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#24

Post by Vivtek »

sjs wrote: post #7
rufibarbatus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, the protocol bit is relevant whenever your link is not domain- or protocol-relative, or when you can't be sure. And you can't be sure . Here's why: if someone saves your page on their hard drive and you're using protocol-relative URLs, the implied "http" just became "file". (Which in fact may be a nice excuse for some clever hacks.) Test it yourself! Save the following snippet to your computer and see how…

You're assuming people care about that use case. I think in most cases it's irrelevant.

Oh man. Are you really saying that corner cases are a priori negligible? That seems like a dangerous road to start down when you're discussing basic protocols!

Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#26

Post by rufibarbatus »

teyc wrote: post #15
rufibarbatus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, the protocol bit is relevant whenever your link is not domain- or protocol-relative, or when you can't be sure. And you can't be sure . Here's why: if someone saves your page on their hard drive and you're using protocol-relative URLs, the implied "http" just became "file". (Which in fact may be a nice excuse for some clever hacks.) Test it yourself! Save the following snippet to your computer and see how…

HTML Base tag is your friend. http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_base.asp

And here it is in the specification:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-base-element

And accordingly, adding `http://example.com/ >` to that test above seems to work well on modern browsers.

Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#27

Post by innes »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #5

I assume that the author intends // to replace http:// , and that all other protocols such as ftp, https, etc. would still be written? If that's the case, why bother with the // at all? Why not just assume, as most browsers already do, that there's an inferred http:// at the beginning of whatever the user types in the address bar? (EDIT - I see that he's talking about how we would refer to URLs in things like print a…

Sorry for the meta-comment, but you seem to be the only person here who actually got what the article was saying.

Re: "//" should indicate a URL

#28

Post by sjs »

Vivtek wrote: post #24
sjs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming people care about that use case. I think in most cases it's irrelevant.

Oh man. Are you really saying that corner cases are a priori negligible? That seems like a dangerous road to start down when you're discussing basic protocols!

If your use case entails people saving your site to disk then you have may not be able to use // for protocol relative links, but most people don't have to worry about such things.

I'm saying that those who need to worry about such things should and the rest of us should not. Nothing more and nothing less.

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