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
- Claude can write complete Datasette plugins now - 8th October 2025
- Vibe engineering - 7th October 2025
- OpenAI DevDay 2025 live blog - 6th October 2025