One of the Internet founders Sir Tim Berners-Lee in an interview for the New York Times said that he regrets addition of slash characters to the web's URL address system. He stated that the use of slash characters in the URL was not compulsory and made the web addresses needlessly longer than they could be.

According to Berners-Lee the protocol names such as HTTP or FTP should be separated from the rest of the address but lately it turned out that only the colon was necessary.

"Think of the amount of print that we could have saved if I would have just removed the double slash," Berners-Lee said.

"But there you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Berners-Lee was giving a symposium interview commenting on the future development of the Internet. He said that we need a "semantic" web that makes better use of data and presents it in new forms.

As is known Berners-Lee is an acknowledged founder, father, of the Internet network being also considered as one of the greatest minds in computing history.