Subject:
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Re: Stick in the mud...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Tue, 13 Jun 2000 02:55:41 GMT
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Viewed:
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1387 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
> A while back I suggested that common "mistake" urls ought to work the way the
> user would expect. And Todd made changes at that time to catch a lot of the
> common ones, at that time. I suspect those changes have been undone, since
> there now is technology that generates blank pages (I presume in anticipation
> of letting people author content) for unrecognized URLs, if they are only one
> level deep from recognised ones.
>
> While this is a good feature in general, it may have some unintended side
> effects. (like the fact that guessing at URLs no longer works)
Actually, those changes are actually all still in place and still working.
For example, if you guess and type in:
http://www.lugnet.com/members/
you'll be auto-forwarded to the correct URL:
http://www.lugnet.com/people/members/
However, if you omit the trailing / character and type in
http://www.lugnet.com/members
then it gives a blank FTX page rather than accessing index.cgi in the
/members/ directory.
I've been debating how to "fix" this situation. Though it's certainly not
broken from a technical perspective, one could argue that it's broken from
a human-factors perspective because people have come to have unreasonable
expectations about making sloppy URLs, namely that it's so common for servers
to add a trailing slash when the user forgets it or is lazy. I think it's a
terribly unfortunate thing when servers do this (IMHO they should instead give
a lecture page about proper URL form and only then act in a fault-tolerant way
and take the user to the most likely intended destination -- or give a list of
close matches), but it seems to be a long-standing tradition. :-/
I might add a check which looks to see if </foo/bar/> is a "real" URL before
giving an empty page when </foo/bar> is accessed. It would prevent having two
different pages </foo/bar> and </foo/bar/> (the latter being a short form of
</foo/bar/index>). Then, if </foo/bar/> is a "real" URL, it could either
auto-forward from </foo/bar> to </foo/bar/> or give an error page like this
one:
http://www.lugnet.com/lsahs
which helps deter sloppy (i.e. wrong) URLs from being propagated.
--Todd
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Stick in the mud...
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| In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes: <snip> (...) You're technically correct. Leaving off a trailing slash is technically "wrong" syntax. But before we condemn servers for automatically adding it back in and doing what the user expects (...) (24 years ago, 13-Jun-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: Stick in the mud...
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| (...) What makes you think users "forget" or are "lazy" if they don't enter a trailing slash? Do you honestly believe that the majority of users even know they they "should" put in the trailing slash? (...) You may have the technical slant on your (...) (24 years ago, 13-Jun-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Trailing Slashes (Re: Stick in the mud...)
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| Two advance notes: 1. Sorry to bring a possibly dead-horse issue again, but I actually have a new data point to add. 2. There didn't seem to be a truly stellar place to hang this follow-up, so I just picked a message that was high up in the thread. (...) (24 years ago, 18-Aug-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Stick in the mud...
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| (...) Scott, you're all wet. The stuff you're picking at is perfectly clear to any reasonably clued person. However, if you really really want to be picky, why not pick on THIS (the last page) instead. See the admin > financial > donations page for (...) (24 years ago, 9-Jun-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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