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Comment by warwick | Hacker News Reader

In this case, where you're typing the URL in a form, presumably as some sort of content management system, you're not telling your browser to go directly to the URL but rather saying 'I want to use this resource, it's at this URL'.

Before it uses that URL for anything, the server should process it, and if it's missing something like a protocol, add in a good default like http.

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It never even gets to a server if it doesn't have a protocol. The browser would have no idea what to do with it. It wouldn't even know how to understand it.

Is:

  foo@bar.com

  mailto:foo@bar.com
  or
  ftp://foo@bar.com
  or
  http://foo@bar.com

Each one of those does something totally different, and all are legal.

The browser can add a default though - and it does.

It's a text field in a form. The browser doesn't need to have any ideas about what to do with it except submit it to the server.

Submit it how? Submit it where? It's obvious you know nothing about this.

Each one of those protocols works totally different. Different ports, different messages to the server, different ways of contacting the server.

And it's not a text field either. It gets broken up into multiple pieces and each piece is used in a different part of the conversation with the server. And on top of that you need to understand the format to even figure out which server to talk to.

You're talking about the address bar, probably because this issue came up big last time with regard to Google Chrome.

They're talking about input fields in forms in the contents of the page.

So, you both know what you're talking about, you just don't know what they are talking about :)

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