However, scheme relative URLs (i.e. //example.com/thing.jpg) are useful in edge cases where you want to request assets using the same protocol as the document, are they not?
http:example.com/thing.jpg
:example.com/thing.jpghttp:username:password@example.com/thing.jpg http:username:password@example.com:8080@example.com/thing.jpg
But they might have picked a different delimiter for that in this alternative future. Or perhaps realized it was a bad idea earlier.
IPv6 addresses are a different story. We definitely would have chosen a different character to delimit IPv6 addresses in this future.
https://serverfault.com/questions/638260/is-it-valid-for-a-h...