http-urls style, trailing slash and webdav

Hello

I'm not sure if this is the right list - please redirect me if there is 
a more appropriate forum.

I was looking for recommendations about the use of trailing slashes in 
http-urls,my opinion was, that is better style not to terminate the URLs 
with a slash as

    * It is unclear if a resources will once have subcategories (on
      wymiwyg.org "/knobot" has the subcategory "/knobot/development"
      while "/rdf-utils" hasn't yet a subcategory
    * The alternative, terminating all URLs with slash would lead to
      ugly URLs when an extension to force a content-type is added (like
      "bla/.rdf") and leads to unintuitive names when downloading
      resources (such as with wget)

So currently I my server answers like this:
http://wymiwyg.org/knobot -> 200 Success
http://wymiwyg.org/knobot/ -> 404 Not found
http://wymiwyg.org/knobot/development -> 200 Success

However implementing support for webdav all the clients I tested at 
least occasionally requested a collection without trailing slash, even 
if was referenced with slash in the containing collection, this makes it 
impossible to have two differen resource at http://wymiwyg.org/knobot (a 
GET-dereferencable resource) and http://wymiwyg.org/knobot/ (a 
dav:collection). It seems that the expected behavior is  that an URL 
with removed trailing slash either causes the same server response or a 
redirect to the resource with trailing slash.

On *w3.org I see http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User redirects to 
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/ while http://esw.w3.org/topic/UriSchemes 
witch dereferences without trailing slash even if 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/UriSchemes/http exists.

Is there any recommendation or standard on this?

Thanks,
reto

Received on Thursday, 26 January 2006 11:55:54 UTC