Vote for your favorite below. Or upvote if you prefer sharing urls without "http:", and downvote if you prefer keeping "http:" in the picture.<p>==============<p>Can we agree to drop the use of "http://www.google.com", and let browsers and email clients auto-generate urls from "//google.com" instead?<p>Which do you favor for use in print, email and advertising?<p><i>Option A (http://)</i><p>------------------<p>http://google.com<p>http://facebook.com<p>http://mint.com<p>http://news.ycombinator.com<p>http://voice.google.com<p><i>Option B (//)</i><p>-------------<p>//google.com<p>//facebook.com<p>//mint.com<p>//news.ycombinator.com<p>//voice.google.com<p><i>Option C ()</i><p>-----------<p>google.com<p>facebook.com<p>mint.com<p>news.ycombinator.com<p>voice.google.com<p>Let's see where the community stands. What barriers exist to shortening the syntax for http and https resources to "//url.tld"?<p>If Hacker News supports the shift, Web 2.0 might just might support the change.<p>One proposed measure of spectacular success: If Google Mail staff reading this thread devote development time to prefilling the "//google.com" link destination to "http://google.com" when users highlight and link text that reads "//google.com", and promote this as a flexibility feature to its 350 million active users.<p>(If Google promotes "//link.com" as a secure simplicity feature, we'll save ourselves googols of keystrokes, and enable enhanced textual clarity and reading speed for urls printed in-line in emails and on paper.)
The question is irrelevant, there is already a standard. Browsers use <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a>, dead-tree material uses nothing, and no one uses //, because that's just weird.<p>Typing in <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> is never necessary, so we're already saving as many keystrokes as possible.
If you're reading a dense paragraph of text,and you come across a google.com link, your eye does not immediately recognize it as a link. But if you're reading a paragraph and you see a //google.com link... well now, that's a link!<p>Everything that's new and not normalized with a smiling, attractive face beside it gets written up as weird, until it gets normalized and becomes commonplace.<p>I'm asking HN: Can we collectively make this "//link.com" syntax not weird?
On Prezi, only <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> links are translated into links. Screen real estate is precious in a powerpoint presentation. Why can't "//link" get translated into a hyperlink?