What is the semantics of the double slash following the scheme in a URI?

Question

According to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_identifier, a URI may or may not contain a double slash following the scheme identifier. This makes "urn:issn:1535-3613" a valid URI just as "http://stackoverflow.com".

Is there a strict/formal need to include the double slash or is it optional and in any case, what is the reason/semantics? When answering, please provide a conclusive answer - Don't just report how you browser/library/... handles it.

Answer 1

It's in the RFC you linked: If there is a //, it means that what follows that is the authority. See Section 3. So if the scheme uses an authority, it will use the // after the colon (either requiring it, if authority is required in that scheme, or having it be optional if authority is optional in that scheme). mailto doesn't use an authority in the URI sense, so mailto URIs don't include a //.

Answer 2

Besides the RFC which thoroughly explains the answer, I thought you might like this quote straight from the inventor of the World Wide Web himself.

When [Sir Tim Berners-Lee] was asked what he would have done differently, the answer was easy. "I would have got rid of the slash slash after the colon. You don't really need it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time."

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/06/tim-berners-lee-reclaim-the-web

Answer 3

Well, if you want a "conclusive answer", I think nothing is more conclusive than the official HTTP RFC document (see point 3.2.2 which talks about the HTTP URL scheme).