Newsletter
  • Get a newsletter digest every Friday:
Contact

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

About me and the blog

My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

“Invalid-reverse-solidus validation error”

In my three decades online, it has never occurred for me to try this, and I found it so delightful once I did – both Chrome and Firefox will quietly rewrite backslashes in URLs into slashes:

Not Safari, however, even though the URL living standard says it should.

I am very curious if the presence of backslashes in URLs is owing to Windows still showing backslashes in file paths, or just because people casually don’t see any difference between / and \, which are arguably both similar, and relatively alien in everyday typography. (“Solidus” is the proper typograpical name for this kind of a slash, partly to disambiguate it from all the other slashes with their equally fascinating names.)