Often it's nice to just have conventions and gentleman's agreements. But then sometimes someone doesn't and the harm is done, it's too hard to reverse.

NFS has introduced the de-facto standard of using "<host>:<path>" for the defice of a remote mount. Yes this break because you can have ":" in a filename, but in practice it works.

<rant>

But somehow cifs (formerly smbfs), decided that adhering to the windows syntax was more important then adhering to the unix standard, never mind that it's a filesystem implementation for unix-like systems. So the remote mountpoint for a cifs filesystem is "//<host>/<path>". Yes, this breaks too, you could start any path with "//". But it's just plain annoying when trying to figure out if a filesystem is remote or not.

</rant>