http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator [en.wikipedia.org]
The Uniform Resource Locator was standardized in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee and the URI working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an outcome of collaboration started at the IETF Living Documents "Birds of a Feather" session in 1992. The format combines the pre-existing system of domain names (created in 1985) with file path syntax, where slashes are used to separate directory and file names. Conventions already existed where server names could be prepended to complete file paths, preceded by a double-slash (//).
Berners-Lee later regretted the use of dots to separate the parts of the domain name within URIs, wishing he had used slashes throughout. For example,
http://www.example.com/path/to/name [example.com] would have been written http:com/example/www/path/to/name. Berners-Lee has also said that, given the colon following the URI scheme, the two slashes before the domain name were also unnecessary.
