Subject:
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Re: URL characters
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Sun, 18 Jul 1999 22:04:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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4500 times
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In lugnet.publish, Lee Jorgensen writes:
> Todd Lehman wrote:
> > So what's up with that, anyway? How the heck did ~ gain such huge
> > popularity if it's not officially allowed in URLs? Was it allowed once
> > upon a time? Or is it simply part of today's de facto URL standard
> > because of its extremely wide misuse? (It's too bad that it's not
> > officially allowed, because it's a great character for what it's typically
> > used for.)
>
> Unix makes the ~ character a users home directory ... so UnixSystem/~lee ...
> would be my home directory ...
>
> Now because of this, and since the Internet (Arpanet) were all college
> schools when it 'went public', the system of choice at colleges was Unix,
> this made the web have some of the same naming conventions ...
>
> It's an old thing ... but you know what it's like to get hundreds of people
> to change ... think of what the colleges went through to get millions of
> students to change ... which they didn't.
That's what I thought the etymology of ~ was in URLs too -- but how did it
ever get *allowed* in URLs in the first place? That's what baffles me. The
first time someone tried it, why didn't it fail? The early browsers and httpd
daemons must've silently just passed it on through (as they all do today), and
people must never have bothered to look to see if ~ was actually valid in URLs.
I'll bet it got out of control pretty quickly, especially because it's such
a natural thing to want to use! :-)
--Todd
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: URL characters
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| Wouldn't NCSA be the one to blame? ncsa-httpd supported the feature that caused people to use ~. Did they make that up? KL (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
| | | Re: URL characters
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| Universal Resource Locators (that's what it stands for) started out as path descriptions. For why twiddle is supported, you might read up on the Andrew File System. ~lpien is a valid file path (that is, you can cd to it) on a CTP unix box, or was (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
| | | Re: URL characters
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| (...) Total grokkage there! (Been using ~ for that since '84 :) It's one of the Truly Great Simplicities of modern day computing life, IMHO. (...) I think -that's- the key thing! (People considering it broken.) URLs & URIs do disallow twiddle (ASCII (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: URL characters
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| (...) Unix makes the ~ character a users home directory ... so UnixSystem/~lee ... would be my home directory ... Now because of this, and since the Internet (Arpanet) were all college schools when it 'went public', the system of choice at colleges (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.publish)
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