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
- New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging - 4th August 2026
- Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp) - 31st July 2026
- OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened - 22nd July 2026