Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 15:48:57 +0000 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: "Jay O'Brien" <jayobrien@att.net> Cc: FreeBSD - questions <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: web server permissions question Message-ID: <41D2D1E9.6090007@infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <41CE3405.2090409@att.net> References: <41CDC8E8.6010704@att.net> <41CE3405.2090409@att.net>
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Jay O'Brien wrote:
> I found how to get around this problem, and it isn't permissions
> at all. On the other web server I use, I use relative and shortened
> addressing on links, for example /xyz which, when selected by the
> user, would then send the user the /xyz/home.html file, in the xyz
> subdirectory under the directory where the home page lives.
Hmmm... Actually, that's how it's supposed to work: the automatic
addition of trailing slashes is not implied. Remember that even though
URLs look a bit like directory paths, they are actually very different
beasts indeed. As a webmaster you can, optionally, configure your site
to be helpful by adding slashes to requests, if you want, but you should
never rely on that behaviour. If you're writing HTML then you should
always take care to state the URLs correctly.
The reasons why /foo is a different URL to /foo/ are all to do with how
aliasing works in HTTP -- ie. exactly how the URL is mapped onto the
filesystem (or to some sort of virtual space like a Java object
hierarchy) in order to retrieve the requested data. It isn't always
simple -- in fact, this is one of those occasions where you might hear
the dread term "arbitrarily complex".
> Now, with this version, I find that I must add a trailing /, using
> /xyz/ instead of /xyz, and with that change everything works as
> expected. I can now access home.html files in subtending directories
> with such shortened relative links from my LAN and from the internet.
Take a look at this article which explains (amongst a lot of other
interesting stuff) how to get your Apache server to do internal
redirects for these trailing slash cases -- from the user PoV it will
"just work":
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 8 Dane Court Manor
School Rd
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Tilmanstone
Tel: +44 1304 617253 Kent, CT14 0JL UK
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