How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs?
10th February 2012
My answer to How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs? on Quora
I’m going to take an educated guess and say it’s because of unix file system conventions. Early web servers mapped the URL to a path on disk inside the document root—this is still how most static sites work today.
More recent articles
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025
- The ChatGPT sharing dialog demonstrates how difficult it is to design privacy preferences - 3rd August 2025