Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 07/31/06 09:20

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Els wrote:

> So.. those pages that actually use filenames without extensions are
> all on servers that are configured differently from the default
> configuration?

I don't think that's necessarily so: on a default-configured server,
I would expect a file named "somewhere" to be returned with the
default content type, which always used to be text/plain and I think
(BICBW) still is.

However, if you activate MultiViews then you can *call* your files
"somewhere.html" or "somewhere.shtml" or "somewhere.php", and use
the URL "somewhere", and the reader need never know what the file
extension was. More to the point, you can change it whenever you
please, without having to change the URL,

> These two links:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
>
> Are both valid and correct. If you add a slash after the first one,
> you'll get a 404.

Indeed. All consistent with what I said.

> If you leave out the slash from the second one, the
> browser (even my IE6) will add the slash.

Do I have to repeat that the server does not merely "add the slash",
but has to send back a redirection transaction (which would otherwise
have been unnecessary)? Without this move it, in general, isn't
possible to make relative URLs work correctly.

> You're saying their server is configured differently in that respect
> than other servers?

No: if you proceed in this way, then pretty-much any server's default
configuration will respond by returning a redirection transaction, to
the corrected URL with the trailing slash.

It's if you want to *prevent* that fixup happening, and do something
else, that you need some custom configuration.

h t h

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