Posted by Els on 07/31/06 08:30

Toby Inkster wrote:

> Els wrote:
>
>> http://example.com/somewhere/
>> http://example.com/somewhere
>>
>> Most servers though, are set up to respond to the second one as if
>> there was a trailing slash, as soon as it detects that there is no file
>> by the name of "somewhere".
>
> Not exactly. In the case of a file at the second URL being not found, most
> servers will firstly *check* to see if the first URL would have worked,
> and if so *redirect* to it; if not, send a 404.
>
> I've heard some early servers tried doing as you describe -- serving the
> same page at "somewhere" as they did at "somewhere/", but authors found
> that this broke relative links. (Consider where "logo.jpeg" would be
> requested from in each case!) And so, the behaviour was changed to the one
> I describe -- the redirect.

Makes more sense too :-)

--
Els http://locusmeus.com/

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