Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, March 27, 2002
14:22 - Just read the cue cards...	(top)
Just the other day, I heard another radio ad where the announcer was trying gamely to read off a URL. "Just go to UsedCarBucks dot com, backslash SpecialOffer..." Why do so many people seem to labor under the assumption that "/" is a backslash? Is it because they were around in the 80s when everything in DOS was based on backslashes, and they assume that, well, now it's the same-- it's all just computer stuff-- it's just that you're typing it into a web browser now instead of a command line? The fact that URLs contain slashes as path delimiters (that's forward slashes, everybody, in case there's any confusion in your mind-- they tilt forward, along the same direction that the text is going-- left to right; backslashes tilt backwards, back the way the text came) is one of the most visible inroads that UNIX has made into the everyday desktop world. UNIX uses forward slashes as path delimiters, for instance `/usr/local/bin/pico`. Since the Web began on UNIX, URLs were designed to follow UNIX conventions rather than DOS conventions; if Microsoft had invented the Web, you can bet that URLs would look like `http:\\www.whatever.com\`. But whatever the history, it still bugs me no end when I hear people reading URLs over the radio who have obviously somehow never encountered one before. I'm reminded of one particularly egregious example that I heard on KCBS back in 1996 or so. An oldish-sounding guy, speaking slowly and painstakingly, launched off as follows: "Aitch tee, tee pee... semicolon, backslash, backslash... double-you, double-you, double-you..." Aaaaaaugh! I was squirming in my seat before he got to the "w"s. First of all: You don't need to say the "HTTP" part. It's assumed these days-- browsers tack it on by default. And then, it's a colon, not a semicolon! And then they're forward slashes! Blaaah! I mean, his deliberate, reptilian delivery of the words was bad enough-- he was saying parts of the URL that shouldn't need to be said, and only served to waste precious expensive seconds of airtime. I could understand it if he were taking his time because it was a complex URL that he wanted to make sure people heard clearly, but it wasn't! He was just bewildered by these weird symbols in front of him, assuming his listeners were similarly clueless and copying down each letter with a piece of chalk on a little slate, tongue protruding in concentration from the corners of their mouths. But that wasn't even the worst part! He was taking his time, making sure everybody got every last little detail right-- and then he got the details wrong! I guess you can assume that people will be able to just go by what they remember visually as being the proper parts of a URL, but ":" is a colon, not a semicolon, and "/" is a slash, not a backslash. I was seized with mental images of people on AOL uncertainly hunting-and-pecking their way through typing "`H T T P ;\\ www...`". These days, of course, things are much better. Websites are designed so you can find current special promotions and important resources directly from the main page, so you only have to add two syllables to the name of your company in order to get the point across. "Visit us on the Web at Megaflicks dot com!" But we still hear the occasional ad where the announcer confidently tells us to type semicolons and backslashes, in what's apparently some bastardized Microsoft Web protocol that's made deliberately incompatible with every browser that only handles `http://` style. (Like how MSIE will render a table even if there's no </TABLE> tag, and so people write sloppy HTML without balanced tags because "Hey, it works in MSIE!"... and then they grouse about Netscape because it (correctly!) does not render the table. So now we have web designers all over the world who have effectively written Netscape users out of the picture simply because they're too lazy to write proper HTML, and they get away with it because of a bug in the only browser they test in, so they don't even know they're doing anything wrong. Of course it must be someone else's fault.) So anyway, back to the delimiters. A few months ago, Kris and I were talking about how every operating system had its own path delimiter character. DOS/Windows uses the backslash (\), UNIX uses the forward slash (/), classic MacOS uses the colon (:), and so on. To solve all this confusion, we jotted down a proposal for the Universal Delimiter: It could be used in filesystem paths, in URLs, wherever a hierarchy needs to be described-- and it would be portable from platform to platform. We called it the Blair Witch. "Aitch tee tee pee colon blair witch blair witch..."