Slash and Churn!

I have a guest rant today! This all started with a question I fired off to a friend and fellow geek (ok, actually I'm seriously out-geeked here). Our exchange follows--used with permission, but my Guest Ranter requested anonymity "as it's probably half wrong, but it's the mostly-right part that counts." (Note... you have to get past a couple of exchanges of fairly dry Geekish before the Silly starts!)



Me: "Random question, what's the difference to a computer between a forward slash and a back slash? Don't they both just indicate directory structure?"



GR: "MS-DOS, Windows, and variants use the backslash "\" for folder structure. UNIX, Linux, and most all other operating systems use the forward slash "/". Windows systems running IIS for serving websites use the forward slash for folder structure on the front-end of the website. Clear as mud?"



Me: "The only thing I didn't follow was "IIS" -- is that a system, or a flavor of a system,...? Weird that they'd change from one style of slash to another from the computer system to the web server. Wonder if there was a reason for that. (Or if it was like a NASA thing; one side uses metric and one side doesn't and let's explode something...) "



GR: "IIS is Internet Information Services, Microsoft's suite of site-hosting services for "serving up" WWW, FTP, etc. sites. Similar to Apache web server for Linux.



The internet (and later, the WWW) was around long before Microsoft and Windows existed. It was a happy place, full of unicorns and rainbows and peace-loving beings from all walks of life. The earliest (and still dominant) infrastructure for the internet was built on mainframes and minis running VAX, VMS, AIX, or other UNIX-like systems, so the WWW and the rest of what we collectively refer to as "the internet" sort of inherited that style of folder structure. And then, along came Microsoft.



When Microsoft came on the scene with DOS, and later, Windows, and started making their Operating Systems more network (and thus, internet) capable, by necessity they had to adopt the existing nomenclature for folder structure, especially for running servers. Otherwise, while the rest of the world is linking to http://www.site.com/folder/file.html, if Microsoft had it their way, sites running on Windows would be http:\\www.site.com\folder\file.html and you'd have broken links all over the place.



On the "back end", the nuts-and-bolts part of the server where it does its dirty work, Windows servers still handle folders as drive\folder\file.html but automatically translates that to drive/folder/file.html when the file is being publicly served.



It gets really frustrating when lazy web developers use old and broken versions of MS's Front Page suite, which never did correct the / vs \ behavior, and you'd wind up with a link like "http://www.site.com/files/drivers\windows\driver.exe" --see the switch halfway through? This is still such a widespread problem (solely created by Microsoft's unwillingness to conform to perfectly acceptable standards), there is a plugin for Firefox called "slashy" which automatically corrects "broken" slashes. Of course, IE automagically fixes this bad behavior, but no standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Opera, or Konqueror automatically fix this behavior, because technically speaking, it shouldn't be there in the first place!"



There's supposed to be a fun little end-rant-tag here but I've yet to figure how to get this site to stop stripping it out...



This makes me think of the scene in Zoolander, with Fabio accepting a "Slashy" award: "This means you see me as Best Model-Slash-Actor... and not the other way around." [smirk]