RE: Collections and Request-URIs

   From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@apache.org]

   ... the ONLY interoperable behavior when faced with a slashless
   collection request is to perform an external redirect, even if that
   means existing WebDAV clients will puke and die.

I would have thought that interoperability should take into account
reality (:-).

I can see why you wouldn't want the spec to require that a server
treat identically URIs with and without a trailing slash, but I cannot
see on what basis you would require a server to not make this
equivalence.  A client cannot count on them being different
resources, since the mapping of URIs to resources is up to the
server, but if a server decided to map trailing URIs with and without
a trailing slash to the same resource, it should be free to do so. For
that matter, if it wanted to map every URL in its URL space to the
same resource, it should be free to do so (although it probably
wouldn't be an especially popular web site unless that was a really
interesting resource :-).

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Wednesday, 19 June 2002 23:04:48 UTC