Heard on the radio too many times...

[herveus]

Note to people writing ad copy that includes web sites:

/ is a "slash".

\ is a "backslash".

You cannot put a backslash in a URL. If you tell me to go to "double-u double-u double-u dot dumbass dot com backslash foo" to learn all about dumbass foo, and I follow your instructions, my browser will tell me that the URL is invalid. All of those slanty line thingies in a URL are slashes.

The slanty line thingies you see in Windows Explorer in the fill file names are backslashes. They have always been backslashes, and being too lazy to use the proper name for them doesn't somehow magically change them into slashes.

That is all.

Comments

[wulfsdottir.livejournal.com]

*quietly changes out herveus's Cheerios for some that have not been peed in today*

;) Actually, I feel your pain - my local newspaper can't tell the difference between "than" and "then," which is theoretically a more obvious difference than the one between \ and / - which the paper would publish as "then the one."

[s10clee.livejournal.com]

Not meaning to really get you going... (but I admit it could be fun)

Microsoft's Internet Explorer will gladly accept either, replacing to backslash with a slash on the fly.

[herveus.livejournal.com]

Well that seems like broken behavior to me... :)

But then, I don't use Internet Exploiter unless I have absolutely no alternative.

[fuzzface00.livejournal.com]

Depending on your browser:

http://www.io.com/~fuzzface/%5c
http://www.io.com/~fuzzface/\

You are correct, but I thought I would push the point :-)

[fuzzface00.livejournal.com]

And LJ doesn't recognize the backslash as valid :-)

[herveus.livejournal.com]

Of course, if you *want* a backslash in a URL, it has to be properly encoded as %5c, but they don't read the URLs that way.

Hell, if you call up American Express, their hold speils make the same dumbassed mistake...

[freetrav.livejournal.com]

* FreeTrav cheers!

When dealing with this problem with many of the lusers (sic) that I have to deal with, I've taken to pronouncing '/' as 'unshifted question mark'.

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

I can't say that three times fast, but I think it's a great way of indicating the proper type of slanty character.

[herveus.livejournal.com]

I was getting a new programmer set up with something at work. He needed to type some stuff in a dialog box -- a unix path. I said "enter slash p c m s oh one slash..." and he started typing \pcms01\.
I said "slash" again and he bought the clue, but I was sad inside.

[goddessgoddess.livejournal.com]

I can't ever remember which way is what. But at least I have inner beauty!

[herveus.livejournal.com]

You have hawtness on the outside too... :)

[goddessgoddess.livejournal.com]

See? That's why I keep you around! Despite your nerdy backslash/slash insistance...

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

So, in a language reads from right to left, would a slash slanting up to the left still be a backslash?

[herveus.livejournal.com]

In the limited context of URLs, backslash remains an invalid character. I don't know if Arabic or Hebrew typefaces present different glyphs for those characters... interestion question...

[snolan.livejournal.com]

So what exactly is the difference between a forward tick and a back tick (aka: end single quote, begin single quote; single quotation mark, accent grave)?

To cheer you up:
<>!*' '#
^"'$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[]../
|{,,CRASH


Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

Sadly the forwardness and backwardness of the ticks is hard to read in LJ's default fonts.

[herveus.livejournal.com]

It depends on how you want to look at it. There be Unicode code points for each, two of which fall into the "C0 Controls and Basic Latin" range and one more in the "C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement" range. Beyond that, you get into "General Punctuation", "Combining Diacritical Marks", and (I think) "Spacing Modifier Letters". Ain't Unicode fun?

Another way is to consider the language context...and then there is (so-called) "smart quotes" and other "helpful" things.

u0027 is 'APOSTROPHE'
u0060 is 'GRAVE ACCENT'
u00B4 is 'ACUTE ACCENT'
u2018 is 'LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK'
u2019 is 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK' (and is "preferred for apostrophe")
u2032 is 'PRIME'
u2035 is 'REVERSED PRIME'
u02B9 is modifier letter prime
u02BC is modifier letter apostrophe
u02C8 is modifier letter vertical line
u0301 is combining acute accent
u02CB is modifier letter grave accent
u0300 is combining grave accent

[vesilehti.livejournal.com]

You would think it would be easy to remember. A Backslash is Bendwise; a Slash is bendwise Sinister.

[montuos]

Heralds! *makes rude noise*

[snolan.livejournal.com]

This crowd is an entire semi of heralds (grinning, ducking, and running).