Re: URL ambiguity

robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool)

Mail folder: WWW Talk Jul-Oct 1993
Next message: letchu@seuss.cc.utexas.edu: "Please remove me from this mailing list"
Previous message: Tim Berners-Lee: "Deamon release fixes library mismatch"

Message-id: <9309201548.AA03611@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
From: robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1993 10:48:07 -0500
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: URL ambiguity
Status: RO

/*
 * URL ambiguity  by Kevin Altis (kevin@scic.intel.com)
 *    written on Sep 17,  2:43pm.
 *
 * The following URL illustrates a problem with some Web servers and clients.

<example deleted>

 * So a few questions come to mind. Do other servers have this same problem?
 * Should servers always require an explicit URL and not allow default
 * behavior such as displaying the file "index.html"? Should the URL syntax
 * require a "/" at the end of a directory name?
 * 
 */

I'm not sure if we should require a trailing slash, but the problem remains
  that the slash has to get in the client somehow before the client requests 
  a relative file. 

One solution is to use the protocol's 300 directives to redirect the client
  to the version with a slash on the end. However, this requires a client
  who pays attention to them in order to be seamless, if not, then the user
  will get a message saying "This document has moved here" where the here
  is a link to the directory with a / appended. Current versions of Mosaic do 
  not support the 300 directives, but Marc just put it in so future ones will. 
  HTTPD 1.0a2 (you haven't seen it yet) supports returning 300 directives, 
  perhaps I will also modify the indexing code if it seems worthwhile to
  everyone else.

Thoughts?
--Rob


--
Rob McCool, robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu 
Software Development Group, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
It was working ten minutes ago, I swear...
Real sig <A HREF="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/People/robm/sg.html">here</B></A>