Wow yeah I bet those kids were not born back when web.mit.edu and www.mit.edu were still different things (plus see e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/19990208005346/http://mit.edu/ ).

Or they just parse the URL differently. One possibility is to treat mit.edu as equivalent to www.mit.edu, and web.mit.edu to www.web.mit.edu. This is how I did it when I was a kid (and knew absolutely nothing about programming etc.)

At least we've mostly gotten away from "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash..."

I always thought it was odd when they go with the whole "http://www." voodoo ritual, but then they skip the final slash after the domain.

AFAIK the lack of a path part is allowed in an HTTP URL per RFC2616.

       http_URL = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path [ "?" query ]]

> If the abs_path is not present in the URL, it MUST be given as "/" when used as a Request-URI for a resource (section 5.1.2).

Browsers may differ on whether they auto-fix schemaless URIs, but they're all required to fix path-less URIs. So it's much "safer" to use them.

Or even worse, "h-t-t-p-colon-backslash-backslash..." from people who were used to saying "c-colon-backslash"

Or worse yet still "forward slash forward slash."

How is forward slash worse? At least that's the correct direction.

Because it's a made up term. It's just called "slash."

More like: solidus and reverse solidus!

At least it unambiguously refers to the correct character / as opposed the incorrect character \

Or worse yet, "h-t-t-p colon reverse-backslash reverse-backslash..."

its awesome that URL's can have different protocols. althoug most user/apps will asume http#/www

I heard https mentioned in a spoken url on the radio recently. And they said "that's with secure encryption"

My anecdote confirms your counterpoint. I too was once ridiculed for spelling out www in a conversation with some millennials. Made me feel old.

here's a weird thing about "www": in the netherlands, many people say the "www" out loud when mentioning a domain name, but then omit the dot after the "www". they do mention the dot before the TLD. so a domain like "www.example.nl" would be pronounced as "wwwexample.nl".

to be clear, this is not something incidental. you hear it in radio and tv commercials. there might be a relation with age, with older people forgetting the "." after "www" more often.

This is interesting, I never realized this is the same in France. Sometimes all the words "dot" are omitted. I will have a walk at the office tomorrow to have people read out loud www.example.fr and www.example.nl. This must be seriously researched :)