Re: Libwww suggestions

Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu)
Thu, 25 Aug 1994 21:51:59 -0500


Thus wrote: "Roy T. Fielding"
>Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu> writes:
>> Similarly, people seem hell-bent on using http://foo.bar.edu as a synonym
>> for http://foo.bar.edu/; at some level a null pathname should be replaced
>> with a slash.  My inclination is to do this at url parse time as well.
>> (Some people got mighty confused when MOMspider started generating
>> request lines like  "HEAD  HTTP/1.0" with no path.)
>
>Hmmmmm...I've always been of the opinion that people should be forced
>to write decent HTML.  I guess what I should do is have wwwhttp'request
>send it's own canned redirect message rather than attempting a faulty
>HTTP request.

Actually, the latest draft of the spec (draft-ietf-uri-url-06) reads:

#   If neither <path> nor <searchpart> is present, the
#   "/" may also be omitted.

So, it's legal.  Horray or sigh, as appropriate.
--
Marc VanHeyningen  <http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html>