What does a double forward slash mean in a url aside from the protocol seperator at the begining?

I have seen a lot of urls lately that seem to have hijacked a portion of the site – ‘www.example.com’ In the example url: “http://www.example.com//wp-includes/js/apparently_user_defined_dir/from_here_on/index.html” ‘wp-includes’ is wordpress, and js javascript – what has been done (typically) to these sites and what is to be done? (aside from notifying example.com or their host..)

Thank you.

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1 comment

  1. Apart from the domain the other are “path”
    The link you entered is translated by browser to a HTTP request with the header (example):

    GET //wp-includes/js/apparently_user_defined_dir/from_here_on/index.html HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.example.com
    Connection: keep-alive
    Cache-Control: max-age=0
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2024.2 Safari/537.36
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
    Accept-Language: el-GR,el;q=0.8
    

    Check this line:

    GET //wp-includes/js/apparently_user_defined_dir/from_here_on/index.html HTTP/1.1
    

    Its the server’s job to reply to the request, so if the server knows that
    //wp-includes/js/apparently_user_defined_dir/from_here_on/index.html
    means its ok.

    Most times this is translated to a path on a folder, but probably not in this case.

    The page you entered returns a Status Code: 404 Not Found so … your requested page was not found and it responds you with this error page … which for some reason reports to the user no error. (We all know this is an example page.)