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Eduardo Duarte
.PT IT Director
27-07-2020
The origin of the forward slash
Hello and welcome to my first article in BARRA BARRA. Forward slash... Where does this name come from? Older people will certainly remember the antipodes of the Internet. At that time, where the current search engines did not exist, whenever we changed addresses we said something like "The page is: http two dots slash www dot d n s dot pt”, and if we didn't submit the address exactly like this we wouldn't be able to go where it was supposed.

At that time, what we now know as a web browser was more than that. In addition to bits and bytes transferred in hypertext protocol, aka http, we were also able to browse ftp’s (File Transfer Protocol) and other protocols used.

Over the years, the dominance of http has meant that web browsers and other software have begun to dispense other protocols and to focus more and more on http. This dominance over other protocols has become more and more evident and we have lost the notion that there are other fields that are part of the URL.

I think everyone has heard the expression, but what is a URL? URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is how an Internet address is described and which, as everything in the Internet, meets a standard. The URL is divided into several variable parts, namely: the scheme or protocol, the authority, the path, the resource, the query string and the fragment.

However, let's get back to the beginning and focus on "authority”, this component has the following form: // [userinfo @] host [: port], that is, the forward slash represents in the URL the beginning of "authority”, and it is this part that contains the domain, that is, the forward slash is a precursor of the domain. 

Also for .PT, BARRA BARRA (forward slash) is a precursor of a new way of communicating and, in a way, in a freer approach, of a closer .PT. 




Please note: the articles on this blog may not convey the opinion of .PT, but of its author.
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