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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 07/30/06 22:15
On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Els wrote:
> http://example.com/somewhere/
> http://example.com/somewhere
>
> The first one points to the index file (if there is any) of the
> directory with the name 'somewhere'.
indeed.
> The second one points to a file by the name 'somewhere' in the root
> directory. Most servers though, are set up to respond to the second
> one as if there was a trailing slash,
Er, no, most servers are set up (at least if the directory exists) to
resopond to the second one as if there *ought* to have been a trailing
slash. But in order to get there, it has to send the client agent
this new URL, and wait for the agent to respond to this completely
unnecessary additional transaction (= network overhead) by requesting
the corrected URL which it ought to have requested in the first place.
Some client agents have an option for treating this overhead as an
error, and asking the user's permission to proceed. And a few stroppy
server admins handle it as an error, telling the client that the
requested URL is not available, and thus strong-arming their content
providers to get it right in the first place.
As I suggested on another newsgroup recently (and got rewarded by an
email full of personal abuse from the author of the defective web
page), it's a good idea to visit the intended URL with a conforming
web browser (i.e better not MSIE), and afterwards, copy/paste the URL
out of the web browser's URL field into the document being authored -
so, if the URL was in some need of fixup, it's been corrected for you,
and typos can be ruled out.
> as soon as it detects that there is no file by the name of
> "somewhere".
Despite the fact that in unix-like filesystems you can't have a
directory and a plain file with the same name, it's certainly feasible
to configure a web browser so that it responds with completely
different results for "somewhere" and "somewhere/" - but, due to its
unfamiliarity, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, other than to
demonstrate the possibility for tutorial reasons.
[other non-contentious bits snipped]
all the best
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