Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has apologised profusely for the creation of the double slash "//" prefix at the beginning of each website's address.

The English-born internet mogul explained in the New York Times that while it was a protocol to follow back in 1989 when the system was proposed in an essay, it is not a necessary addition.

Even though everything is now built around these things, with most browsers sorting out this step for people anyway, Mr Berners-Lee's discomfort also relates to an environmental quandary which beleaguers his conscience more by the day.

He concluded: "Look at all the paper and trees that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years - not to mention the human labour and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes."

Tim Berners-Lee now serves as a director of the World Wide Web Foundation, started in 2008 to co-ordinate efforts to "further the potential of the web to benefit humanity".

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.