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6 inventors who regret their very successful creations

4. The two slashes in http://

AP-McFee Inc
File - This screen shot shows the McAfee website.

  • By Tess Danielson Staff Writer

There was a time when accessing a website required a user to manually type in “http://” and it was pretty annoying. Most browsers fill in that prefix automatically now, but the seven-character preamble – letters and slashes and all – is still baked into the operations of the World Wide Web. 

Years later, the man typically credited with creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, admitted in a 2009 interview that it was not essential to add the two slashes to the sequence. Mr. Berners-Lee and his team could have decided on just "http:" and the Web would worked all the same.

Mr. Berners-Lee felt bad for the wasted resources and manual labor he created. He says this unnecessarily inclusion was his one regret looking back on his career. However, compared to some of the other ways we waste our time on the Internet today, this one blunder seems rather small in the grand scheme of things.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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