Uniformly Mistook

I happened to see Jeopardy! last night and was sure I caught them in a wrong answer: The U in URL stands for?

Uniform.

Uniform Resource Locator.

The contestant answered “what is universal?” While I was sitting there thinking “ooh, easy mistake,” Trebek was telling him he was correct, leaving me slack-jawed in a non-yokel sort of way.

I looked it up afterward and learned that universal was the original convention, quickly replaced officially by uniform, but one can be forgiven for using either.  I had figured the only reason the response was considered right had to be something like that, and I found that’s the case.  But I still consider universal to be wrong.

This is nothing compared to my derision for people using URI instead of URL.  I was convinced that once upon a time, someone thought the L was an I, made up a logical sounding set of words for the acronym to justify the I, and then it caught on in some circles.

It turns out that URI and URL are both official and legitimate terms, but URI is a hifallutin one that people made up as a superset that includes URL structures, as well as URL structures that the hifallutin don’t consider URL structures, or something like that.  I couldn’t really tell what the distinction was supposed to be from what I read, because an example of a URI that’s not a URL is, to me, also a URL.

Sadly, the bottom line is I can no longer make fun of those who use URI as being clueless newbies or misguided or whatever.  I’ll have to save my my derision to pour elsewhere.  Oh well.

Posted by on 07/12 at 09:14 AM

Next entry: Well, Duh

Previous entry: In the "you have *got* to be kidding me" category this morning...

<< Back to main