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 18:21:49 GMT
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Viewed:
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1401 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Mike Stanley writes:
> In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> > 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
>
> 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?
OK, let's add "unaware" to that list; some users may be unaware that a URL
is actually /foo/bar/ and perceive it instead as /foo/bar -- especially if
the URL was printed wrong somewhere, such as a print ad.
Note: If the server actually responds to /foo/bar without sending a
'Location:' redirector back to the browser, then it wasn't a wrong URL after
all. But if it redirects the browser to re-request /foo/bar/ instead, then it
was the wrong URL.
> I just went to www.lugnet.com/members
>
> What happens there is broken. [...]
I agree. It should try to help the user find the page he/she was really
looking for.
> > [...] </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.
>
> No it doesn't. People will see that, note the "WRONG URL" for just a second,
> and click on the link. Some will take a look at the url in the link and
> probably not notice any difference between what they typed and what's in the
> link you provide.
Ahh, OK, you're right -- it doesn't explain anything there about what was
wrong with the original URL (namely the lack of a trailing slash).
> Its your system, so you can do what you want with it, but your insistence on
> this level of "technical accuracy" when it isn't necessary is and always will
> be silly.
On most servers, the URL /foo/bar doesn't mean anything because most pages
end with .html or some other filename extension. Here, /foo/bar is the name
of an actual page. Thus, /foo/bar and /foo/bar/ are two different (and both
valid) URLs, the latter being short for /foo/bar/index . Because that is
probably confusing, however, it might be better to have /foo/bar not be
allowed to exist if /foo/bar/ already exists.
> If you're going to do it, though, why not throw up a paragraph or
> two preaching to the usefulness of this sort of anal-retentive attention to
> detail instead of just "WRONG URL"? At least then one or two people might
> actually learn something, even if it will be a tidbit of info that won't
> matter much on 99.9% of the rest of the sites they visit each day...
OK, good idea.
--Todd
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | 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)
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