Re: http-urls style, trailing slash and webdav

Julian Reschke schrieb:
> Reto Bachmann-Gmür wrote:
>>
>> Julian Reschke schrieb:
>>>
>>> Reto Bachmann-Gmür wrote:
>>>>> Why wouldn't you always want to point the client to the variant 
>>>>> with trailing slash?
>>>> According to rfc2518 only collection resources are referenced in 
>>>> the containing collection with a trailing slash. I guess some 
>>>> webdav clients would see only directories.
>>>
>>> Yep. I was referring to collections only.
>> Webdav collections necessarily do, but what's about 
>> get-dereferenceable resource, which are or may become superordinate 
>> to others (such as "myproject" and "documentation of myproject", or 
>> "myimage" and "thumbnail of myimage". In the mail starting this 
>> thread [1] I mentioned why i thought that it would be bad style to 
>> end get- dereferenceable with slash (not as bad as 
>> http://ex.org/cgi-bin/foo.pl?artid=9876876 :-).
>
> WebDAV has no problem with collections being GET-dereferencable. It 
> also has no problems with a resource "a" being GET-deferencable, later 
> being replaced by "a/" being both GET-deferencable and being a 
> collection.
>
> So I guess I still don't understand the problem.
Ok, I think I originally wanted to ask two questions:

Question 1: would you agree, that for following reasons it is better 
style if get-dereferenceable resources do not end with a slash:

       1. It is not always clear for which resources you may want to
          create subordinate resource in future, and you don't want to
          change URIs
       2. The mapping meaning-url should be as consistent as possible,
          but the fact that a resource has, or possibly will have
          subordinate resources is not essential to the meaning
       3. When saving a representation of a resource to disk, client
          agent suggest/choose better names, if the URL does not end wit
          a slash
       4. It looks bad to have a slash followed by a question mark or a
          dot (as for get-parameters, or language/media-type forcing
          extension)
       5. Oakham's razor and the waste of bandwith :-)


Question 2: am I missing something, or all webdav clients I tested 
broken, when they retrieve collections without a trailing slash?

I interpreted Frank's reply [1] as "you aren't missing anything, go 
ahead post bugs for the the clients you used" which  would answer my 
second question.

The first question seems still open to me.

viele grüsse,
reto



1. http://www.w3.org/mid/43D8C6B7.6B5@xyzzy.claranet.d

>
>> ...
>
> Viele Grüße, Julian
>