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
- My review of Claude's new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name - 9th September 2025
- Recreating the Apollo AI adoption rate chart with GPT-5, Python and Pyodide - 9th September 2025
- GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search - 6th September 2025