
Ask HN - codedrome
I have noticed that educational institutions (.edu in the US, .ac in the UK) usually have staff pages in the format &#x2F;~[name].
I don&#x27;t think I have seen this elsewhere. Is there a reason?
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troydavis
It’s the Unix convention (shell expansion) for a the path to a user’s home
directory: [https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Tilde-
Exp...](https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Tilde-
Expansion.html)

As a result, many Web servers exposed user-provided Web content using the same
path:
[https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/howto/public_html.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/howto/public_html.html)

Universities have continued using that convention, probably because professors
have accounts (and thus URLs) for decades.

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codedrome
I thought it might be something like that. Thanks for the explanation.

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codedrome
I included a tilde in the title and it and the text after it disappeared.
Strange.

