On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Jonathan Vanasco <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Jan 30, 2:06 am, Mike Orr <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I consider such slash manipulation to be highly unorthodox and
>> undesirable, but that's how you can do it if you want to.
>
> Thanks Mike!
>
> I find the slash manipulation to be standard.
>
> The default behavior for static webservers has been:
>
> filesystem:
>   /folder/index.html
>
> urls:
>   /folder/index.html
>   /folder/
>   /folder ( redirects to /folder/ )

By slash manipulation I meant capturing the slash in a variable and
stripping it out in a route function. What you have here is the
tradition of a static server, where "/folder/" is shorthand for
"/folder/index.html", and "/folder" redirects to it so that any
relative links in the document will work.

You can do this with Pylons, but it seems more common to treat
trailing "/" like ".html" -- unnecessary cruft from the world of
static servers. The corollary is that Pylons pages normally don't have
relative URLs -- they generally have root URLs generated by url(). If
you want to use relative URLs, you may have to go with the trailing
slash syntax.

One reason the trailing slash isn't common is that it can be hard to
tell what's a "directory" in a dynamic application.  The page may be
perfectly fine as a standalone page (file-like), but also have an
optional something below it.  For instance, "/about" and
"/about/subpage1".  And a naive user is going to type the URL without
the trailing slash anyway because he may not know there's something
below it. And maybe a later version of the site will change its mind
about whether the URL is a "file" (with no children) or a "directory"
(with children).

The main thing to avoid is serving the same content for "/folder" and
"/folder/" without a redirect, because that means there's two URLs for
the same item. So proxies will cache both URLs separately, and
different users may bookmark one or the other, and if you ever
reorganize your URL scheme you'll have to put redirects for both.

-- 
Mike Orr <[email protected]>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"pylons-discuss" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en.

Reply via email to