Berners-Lee says sorry for the slashes

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the World Wide Web, has apologised for the dual forward slashes at the start of URLs.

He spoke to The Times newspaper and admitted that URLs didn’t need those initial double slashes, but that they “seemed like a good idea at the time”.

He also used his light humoured apology to lament the amount of ink and paper that has been wasted over the years when printing out Web addresses with the unnecessary slashes.

In other words, while the Web has grown Amazon.com, it hasn’t done the real Amazon rainforests much of a favour.