Nearly two decades after he invented the world wide web, British scientist Sir Tim

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Berners-Lee has admitted that the forward slashes in internet addresses “were a mistake”.

Claiming the // at the front of a web address was pointless, Tim confessed at a recent talk in the US that at the time of creating the www, he had failed to predict how much effect it would have on people now.

“When I designed the URL, the slash was to indicate we’re actually starting at the top, not starting down at the next slash. Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //,” he said, while speaking at a symposium organised by Finland’s Technology Academy Foundation.

Tim invented the web while working at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland 20 years ago. In his spare time, he developed a revolutionary idea of linking pages, which he named the world wide web, and launched the first website in 1991.

“Boy, now people on the radio are calling it ‘backslash backslash’. Look at all the trees that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years – not to mention the time spent typing those two keystrokes millions of times in browser address boxes,” he quipped.