Slash or no slash?

hgs@research.att.com (Henning G. Schulzrinne)

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Message-id: <9401141447.AA05029@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 94 09:46:07 EST
From: hgs@research.att.com (Henning G. Schulzrinne)
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Slash or no slash?
Content-Length: 908

This may have been beaten to death several times over, but here goes:

According to the BNF description 

  http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html,

http URL's don't need a trailing slash after the host, i.e.,
http://www.research.att.com (without the trailing slash) is legal.

Furthermore, relative URLs are supposed to not start with a slash.
(see Relative.html, same place).

However, if lynx (2.1) is fed the non-trailing-slash HTTP and tries to
access a relative URL (say "mbone-faq.html"), it simply concatenates
the two, with dire results, into
http://www.research.att.commbone-faq.html. Mosaic automatically appends
a slash and thus has no problem.

Is it just that Lynx is broken or is something else wrong?

---
Henning Schulzrinne (hgs@research.att.com)
AT&T Bell Laboratories  (MH 2A-244)
600 Mountain Ave; Murray Hill, NJ 07974
phone: +1 908 582-2262; fax: +1 908 582-5809