Re: [NNTP] NNTP URI draft

Russ Allbery said:
> It's not clear to me whether we should allow the trailing slash to be
> optional.  What did HTTP do here?  I know that browsers support leaving it
> off, but is that fixed internal to the browser, or actually allowed in the
> protocol?

There's two different situations.

If you ask for "http://a.server/a/path", the browser constructs a GET
request:
    GET /a/path HTTP/1.1
to be sent to a.server.

"http://a.server/a/path" and "http://a.server/a/path/" are actually two
different resources. They will result in, respectively:
    GET /a/path HTTP/1.1
    GET /a/path/ HTTP/1.1

What usually happens is that the first generates a "redirected" response
pointing at the second, and the browser makes a second request.

"http://a.server" is a special case. RFC 2616 says that:

    Note that the absolute path
    cannot be empty; if none is present in the original URI, it MUST be
    given as "/" (the server root).

So "http://a.server" and "http://a.server/" both generate the request:
    GET / HTTP/1.1

--

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