No trailing slash in URL

[Thomas Dowling]

NCSA Mosaic reports this site is running Apache 0.6.5.  Since the current
version is 1.0.5, maybe the folks at uva.nl need to get off their
backsides and their beta version, and be a little more concerned about the
way users want to access their site.  Even though I make a habit of
including the trailing slash, I don't want some web administrator halfway
around the world trying to dictate how I write my [otherwise valid]
links.

I don't find anything in either the standard for URLs (RFC 1738) or the
standard for HTTP 1.0 (from the W3C web site) that requires the trailing
slash or justifies this kind of snotty response.  The various servers I
have worked with have all treated URLs ending "<directoryname>" and
"<directoryname>/" synonymously.

Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu


----------
> From: Carole Leita
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: No trailing slash in URL
> Date: Thursday, May 16, 1996 12:29 AM
> 
> When I clicked on a link from a Yahoo page this evening I got back the
> following message from the server it went to. I started teaching about
> this in the last HTML workshop I gave, but this is the first time I've 
> seen server administrators try to get people to write better URL's. Have

> you looked at your URL's lately? ;)
> _____________________
> >From the link: http://www.fwi.uva.nl/~heederik/zappa
> ______________________________________________________________
> The directory you specified /~heederik/zappa was not followed by a ``/''
> 
> You asked our server for a URL that matched a directory here, but which
> does not end in a slash (``/''). Many servers handle this case by
telling
> your client to retry the request with a URL that has a slash at the end.
> However, this has bad performance effects on our server, and we would
> rather display this message so that you, the user, can edit your ``hot
> list'' such that the URLs you use to reach us always have trailing
slashes
> unless they are explicit files. 
> 
> If this seems like a horrible kludge, we agree, and we suggest that you
> take your complaint up with the HTTP protocol designers. You can send us
> mail if you wish, but be warned that we are relatively set in our ways
on
> this topic. 
>