Guillaume Rousse wrote: > Well, i understand for the directory/file disambiguation, but when requesting > just the domain, it is a non-sense, as there is no ambiguity at all.
True enough, but that's just the way http works. The standard allows configuration flexibility, which is important when the admin needs to change default behavior without hacks. > And anyway, the server has still to do a redirect to the precise default page. > If you really want to avoid this, you have to use an explicit URL as > http://my.domain.com/index.html, but then you're lost the day the webmaster > switch to index.php instead. Actually, no. There's a difference between a null termination to slash-terminated redirect and the "/" = "index.xxx" assignment. The former is a http transaction (the server tells the browser to try another address, if it wishes to do so) and the latter is a server-side interpretation. The http configuration file(s) tell the server what page, if any, to serve when a directory is requested. There is some overhead, but not nearly as much as the network back-and-forth triggered by an http redirect. All of which is beside the point for most people's perceived experience, but the conditions do exist nonetheless. - John
