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 Administrative / General / 7564
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Subject: 
Trailing Slashes (Re: Stick in the mud...)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Fri, 18 Aug 2000 15:23:02 GMT
Viewed: 
1385 times
  
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.

Anyway, here's the situation:  I noticed today that in my browser's (IE5.0)
history, trailing slashes are not stored.  Since LUGNET requires the
trailing slash, it's hard(er) to use the historic links kept by my browser
to revisit content on LUGNET.  This affects both the explicit History
function, and the drop-down, typeahead-matching list attached to the
Address (ie, URL) textbox.

Example: I visited <http://www.lugnet.com/ldraw/parts/> this morning.  When
I wanted to return to the page later, I opened history, found the link, and
tried to follow it.  All that appeared in the browser was a page that said:

   Looking for this?

Where the 'this' was a link to the page I wanted.

I then noticed that there was no trailing slash on the URL in the Address
box.  It showed:

   http://www.lugnet.com/ldraw/parts

Yuck all around.

Steve

In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman wrote:

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.  :-/



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Trailing Slashes (Re: Stick in the mud...)
 
(...) This sounds like a bug in IE. (URL) refers to a different thing than (URL). (24 years ago, 18-Aug-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Stick in the mud...
 
(...) Actually, those changes are actually all still in place and still working. For example, if you guess and type in: (URL) be auto-forwarded to the correct URL: (URL) if you omit the trailing / character and type in (URL) it gives a blank FTX (...) (24 years ago, 13-Jun-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

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