Backslash

Okay, there needs to be some serious intention put into education on this point:

This: ‘\’ is a backslash.
This: ‘/’ is a forward slash, or just a slash.

Is it a niggling little issue (he asks rhetorically, while also rhetorically referring to himself in the third person)?

        <span id="more-52"></span>

        <p>Yes; it is however an <em>important</em> issue, because we use computer systems for which these two characters have different meanings. In particular, this is <em>not a valid <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</acronym></em> (i.e. Web site address):</p>

http:\\www.google.com\images

If you feed the above into a browser, you will get an error message. This didn’t stop an NPR announcer from quoting a URL on the radio in similar fashion, though. The correct address is:

http://www.google.com/images

and the correct way to read this is “H-T-T-P colon slash slash W-W-W dot google dot com slash images”. You can also elide the first part and just say “W-W-W dot google dot com slash images”, and it will still work if you type it into your browser’s address field.

The difference is important outside just the Web, though. In written English, the slash is used in several ways, and in none of these situations is the backslash acceptable. For example, when quoting poetry inline, the slash is used to indicate a line break: “since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you;”.

The backslash was ostensibly invented by an IBM engineer in 1960. In any case it is a modern invention, used only in computer systems for a few particular purposes, which purposes do not include Web addresses.