Blog / In the Wild
In the Wild
Characters where people actually meet them — in a URL, on a keyboard, along a road. What each one is doing there, and why that one and not another.
Mathematics runs on notation nobody quite agreed on The division sign meant subtract in Norway, the integral sign was a private shorthand, and the minus on your keyboard is the wrong character. How maths got its punctuation. The punctuation that runs the web A web address is a parse, and a dozen marks are its grammar. What RFC 3986 reserved, what it left alone, and why the tilde spent eleven years being unsafe.