Re: URL Question, hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org

I know that building our search engine, it can't spider the link without=20
the slash at the end of the URL so my  uneducated guess is that the=20
difference in handling the URL with and without the slash may be related to=
=20
CGI scripts?

Linda

At 02:26 PM 2/28/02, you wrote:
>At 11:03 28/02/02 -0500, Todd.Alexander(at)epamail.epa.gov wrote:
><snip/>
>>When it comes to URL's, you'll see a lot of people either end their
>>URL's with a "/" and others don't.
>>
>>For example, http://www.epa.gov/   rather than   http://www.epa.gov
>>
>>Is there any type of rule or preference out there that is for best
>>practices?
><snip/>
>
>Sometimes the trailing `/' matters, other times it doesn't.
>
>http://www.example.com will almost always redirect to=20
>http://www.example.com/. The redirection will be seamless and almost=20
>instant. There will be a slight overhead, but not much. If you are getting=
=20
>so many hits that this is an issue, you will be needing to look into lots=
=20
>of other optimizations too.
>
>I suppose I could set my my webserver to treat http://www.example.com and=
=20
>http://www.example.com/ differently, but I don't see any reason to.
>
>The training `/' becomes important when its on the end of a path. For=
 example,
>
>http://www.example.com/path/to/document/ and=20
>http://www.example.com/path/to/document
>
>are potentially different.
>
>On http://aamcf.co.uk/ I use content negotiation[1] so that the filename=20
>extension doesn't have to appear on the end of the URI.=20
>http://aamcf.co.uk/temp/trailingshlash and=20
>http://aamcf.co.uk/temp/trailingslash/ are different things (for a start=20
>one exists, the other doesn't)
>
>Interestingly, odd things happen if I put something at=20
>http://aamcf.co.uk/temp/trailingslash/ as well as=20
>http://aamcf.co.uk/temp/trailingslash, but I suspect this is due to either=
=20
>my ISP's cache being odd or some of the other stuff on my server being=
 helpful.
>
> From a usability perspective, never make the slashed and unslashed=20
> versions of a URI point to different things. Its very confusing.
>
>Andrew
>
>[1] Why? see http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
>
>--
>http://aamcf.co.uk/
>

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