Re: http-urls style, trailing slash and webdav

> On Jan 30, 2006, at 10:34 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
>> http://www.w3.org and http://www.w3.org/ are two different URIs
>> that identify the same resource. They identify the same resource
>> because the two different URIs specify the same effective procedure
>> for connecting to the resource (whether via GET, POST, or some
>> other HTTP method).
>
> For an example from the other direction, http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
> misc/Tim and http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim/ do not identify
> the same resource (in fact, there is no resource corresponding to the
> latter)
Yep - my URI styling question was in fact about this case, the best practice
I would suggest (new paragraph for Timbl's "Cool URIs" document) would be:

"Cool HTTP-URLs don't end with a slash unless they point to the root of a
webserver or point to an index of subordinate resources."

See my previous posts for reasons/arguments.  I didn't mention the
second exception before, but I think this is coherent with the meaning such
an URL has  in the context of webdav. I realize there is still some grey
between
a "rich index" (with slash) and a "superodinate resource" (without slash),
still
if this practice would be adopted for the w3c-website, chances to guess if
an URL ends with slash or not would be much higher. Or did anyone succeed
in the puzzle in my second but last mail?

> This breaks poorly-written web robots that foolishly assume
> that they can append "/" to URIs where the last path component
> doesn't have a "."  -Tim
I wouldn't use the attribute "web" for such pieces of software :-)

Reto

Received on Monday, 30 January 2006 19:39:03 UTC