Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

6
  • 5
    Some images can only be served over HTTP, others only over HTTPS. Using a protocol relative URL might break things. Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 7:50
  • 5
    @PatrickHofman I think Martin is (also?) referring to posts that currently have images with a protocol-relative URL In them. Since these are presumably already available over HTTPS, it would make sense to leave this kind of URI alone (as in: don't convert them to a link) as they'd get loaded over HTTPS if the embedding page is also loaded over HTTPS, anyway. Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 8:28
  • I could agree with that, although it is little work to update them too. Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 8:31
  • 1
    @user2428118: Indeed. Also intra-stackexchange links in comments without the schema are shorter, which enables us to write longer comments. :-) Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 9:20
  • 7
    There is absolutely no sense in using protocol-relative URLs anymore. All clients support (or should) https, and TLS is not slow anymore. The only reason protocol-relative URLs were useful was to speed up load times when the page was loaded over http anyways. Now it's no use to use this hack syntax to explicitly downgrade the security of the asset being linked to (image) if it can be served over https. Plus it breaks the filesystem scheme. joonas.fi/2016/12/27/stop-using-protocol-relative-urls Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 16:09
  • 14
    @MartinSchröder Did you even read the link in your answer? Now that SSL is encouraged for everyone and doesn’t have performance concerns, this technique is now an anti-pattern. If the asset you need is available on SSL, then always use the https:// asset. Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 16:47