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Why should I use URLs without the http://?
Christopher Brooks, 1 May 2015
Last updated: 8 May 2015

We are working on getting the websites to always use SSL (https). The http:// links will continue to work, they will redirect to https:// links.

There are many reasons to use https all the time. The primary reason is that it prevents a type of attack known as a man-in-the-middle attack. In addition, in the future, web browsers will start marking http:// sites as insecure. So, we might as well get started supporting this, it is not that hard.

The biggest issue is that in general, when writing html code and creating links within the website it is best to use a path relative from the root instead of using http://www.terraswarm.org.

Good:

<a href="/projects/terraswarm/pubs/332.html">A Vision of Swarmlets</a>
The above is good because if we are visiting the page where the link appears using https and we click on the link, then we get a https page.

Bad:

<a href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/332.html">A Vision of Swarmlets</a>
If we are visiting the page using a https url where the above link appears and we click on the link, then we go to the http page instead of the https page.

Images are also a problem, we should avoid using www.terraswarm.org and use a URL that starts with / as above.

For the wiki, instead of

[[www.terraswarm.org/pubs/332.html | A Vision of Swarmlets]] 

Use

[[Path:/pubs/332.html | A Vision of Swarmlets]] 

Admins: See Exclamation Point next to a https site url for how to identify problems and fix them.