URL detection is tricky because people omit the “http://” part of URLs. It used to be that you could look for stuff beginning with “www.”, but nobody uses “www.” anymore, so now you basically have to have a list of TLDs and look for anything ending in “.<tld>”. Now that everybody will be able to register their own TLD, will URL detection even be feasible for humans any more? I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to solve this problem for a while, because we need some kind of notation to replace “.<tld>”. I mean I don’t think people will go back to writing <http://coca-cola>, so when I saw the title of this post I immediately knew what the idea was: let’s write //coca-cola to denote “the URL coca-cola”. (Unfortunately, both Google Chrome and Safari interpret “//coca-cola” as “file:///coca-cola”.)

I don’t know why everybody is talking about the technical meaning of //coca-cola, as that’s kind of irrelevant. Us web developers will of course still be typing the full http://coca-cola, as we always have.