# Re: URI host part changes when accessing default files

Ari Luotonen (luotonen@netscape.com)
Thu, 2 Mar 1995 17:55:23 +0500

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    Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 17:55:23 +0500

    Message-Id: <199503022251.OAA10134@neon.netscape.com>

    From: Ari Luotonen <luotonen@netscape.com>

    To: Multiple recipients of list <www-proxy@www10.w3.org>

    Subject: Re: URI host part changes when accessing default files

> I know, however the CERN server remaps directory URLs
> automatically. See,
>
> http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/User/Config/General.html#AlwaysWelcome

The document in question is CERN httpd manual, and this directive
applies to it only when it's acting as a normal HTTP server, not as a
proxy. In other words, from the HTTP server configuration perspective
the URL forms with and without the trailing slash can be mapped to the
same resouce. However, from the client perspective these two URLs are
different, and the slash affects translation of relative URLs.

CERN httpd has code to generate different directory listings depending
on if the trailing slash is there. NCSA httpd always issues a
redirect to the form with the trailing slash, CERN doesn't require
this for generated directory listings, only for HTML welcome pages.

Cheers,

    --
    Ari Luotonen				ari@netscape.com
    Netscape Communications Corp.		http://home.netscape.com/people/ari/
    501 East Middlefield Road
    Mountain View, CA 94043, USA		Netsite Server Development Team

    > Which says:
    >
    > 	AlwaysWelcome
    >
    > 	By default there is no difference between directory names with
    > 	and without a trailing slash when it comes to welcome pages.
    > 	The one without a trailing slash will cause an automatic
    > 	redirection to the one with a trailing slash, which then gets
    > 	mapped to the welcome page.
    >
    > 	If it is desirable to have plain directory names to produce a
    > 	directory listing, and only the ones with a trailing slash
    > 	cause the welcome page to be returned, set the AlwaysWelcome
    > 	directive to off:
    >
    > 		AlwaysWelcome Off
    >
    > 	Default value is On.
    >
    > It should work exactly the same as the syntactically correct URL.
    >
    > Cheers, Craig
    >

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