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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

checking out the source i noticed all the hrefs are missing http:, how does that work, whats the purpose of this?

It is a protocol relative url. This way if you are looking at the site over https then the assets will also come down over https.

I was pondering today why no-one really knows about or even uses it.

As a bit of a general question to everyone, did old browsers not support it or something? Or do people prefer using relative urls over absolute style ones?

Paul Irish blogged about it a while ago http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/

For those interested, the reason the old google analytics snippet wasn't using this instead of document.write:

There is an edgecase bug in IE6 that causes a dialog to blow up… under some security settings (unsure if they are default) when requesting form the non-'ssl' subdomain

So looks as if it's fine to use if you're not supporting IE6.

The new GA snippet uses different domains for the two modes so it can't be used.

I had to be told, years back, so I think it's just an assumption.

Also, for those pesky secured sites that have unsecured static assets on a separate server, it might be that those servers aren't configured for SSL.

No point in that configuration though as your browser will report the site as insecure.

It's a network-path reference as defined in RFC 2396. The purpose is to fetch styles/scripts/images by https if the page is fetched by https.

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