<p class="normal">I cringe every time I hear this done wrong, and it happens all the time on radio advertisements. Let me set the record straight:</p><p class="normal">If you're reading the URL "nytimes.com/pages/world", say, "nytimes dot com slash pages slash world". Never call either of those things a backslash. It's not only unnecessary, it's wrong.</p><p class="normal">I suspect the confusion about slashes stems from Microsoft's use of the backslash in DOS, the popular operating system from the 1990s. In filenames and paths, DOS used a backslash (\) to separate folder names. For instance, a folder name might be "C:\DOS", or "C colon backslash DOS". Unix systems didn't use this convention, and that's largely what the Internet is based on.</p><p class="normal">Of course, in the DOS days, computers were unforgiving. If you accidentally used a forward slash, things wouldn't work. Today, if you unnecessarily use a backslash in a web browser, your computer now knows enough to ignore you and do the right thing.</p><p class="normal">Don't believe me?</p><p class="normal"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)</a> <br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash</a> </p><p class="normal">And while I'm on the subject, you never have to say or type "http://", and you almost never need the "www". Just say or type, "Google dot com". In fact, for popular sites, you rarely even need the "dot com".<br /></p>
2008-11-12T03:05:17Z
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The slash (/) that shares its key with the question mark is not a backslash. It's a plain old forward slash, and should always simply be called "slash". This is the same slash that you see in URLs.
It's Not a Backslash
2008-11-12T03:08:53Z