[6353] in www-talk@info.cern.ch

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Re: URL syntax question

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Sanders)
Thu Oct 27 06:08:52 1994

Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 10:59:01 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>

Marcelo Magallon writes:
> Mosaic seems to understand that this is
>      http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo/HTML/html_primer.html
> but Lynx 2.2 gives
>      http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagalloHTML/html_primer.html

The URL should have the trailing slash.  Given the above I would say that
both browsers are broken.  The algorithim is supposed to be "deleted back
to the last slash then add the partial URL".

So "http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo" + "HTML/html_primer.html" should become
"http://www.ucr.ac.cr/HTML/html_primer.html" (note that ~mmagallo gets
dropped).  At least that is my understanding.

Think about it like this, "http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo/" is *really*
supposed to be like "http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo/index.html" (maybe
yours isn't called index.html or maybe it's generated on the fly, doesn't
matter--this is just an explination of how and why).

Some servers will reject access to a directory without a trailing
slash (they issue a redirect the client to correct it).  But, in
general, a directory access should have a trailing slash.

--sanders

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