Are you X7.45 compliant?
By Anders Pearson | March 26th, 2004 | Filed in Web Standards (general)
Skip to comment formThe folks at no-http.org would like to see the ubiquitous ‘http:’ removed from the beginning of all our URLs. So instead of linking to “http://example.com/” in your pages, you would link to just “//example.com/”.
This is actually quite legal. RFC 1808 specifies that URLs beginning with ‘//’ should just inherit the scheme of the base URL.
The argument for doing things this way is appealing to paranoid future-obsessed weirdos (like me). While HTTP is currently the most common way to deliver HTML, it could conceivably change in the future. Using scheme inheritance for links will prevent you from having to change them if or when things move away from HTTP.
Naturally, there’s a catch. I’m sure most of you have guessed it already: browser support. Surprisingly, the problem isn’t with the usual suspects. IE, Mozilla, and Konqueror all handle it properly. Unfortunately, Safari, Omniweb, and some versions of Opera all fail. So if you care about users with those browsers, you may want to hold off on making your site “Class X7.45.”
Now if I can just figure out where on earth they got the name “Class X7.45″ from…