On 30/04/2006, at 10:50 AM, Ian Bicking wrote: > Phillip J. Eby wrote: >> At 07:48 PM 4/28/2006 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote: >>> One is not more complex than the other. >> >> The implementation has more moving parts, but I was talking about >> conceptual complexity. >> >> The most common web servers do not match path prefixes, they have >> directories and files. You can't have /foo/bar without a /foo. I >> see >> little value in implementing a system where you *can* have /foo/bar >> without a /foo. HTTP URLs are inherently and explicitly >> hierarchical; >> they aren't arbitrary strings that happen to have slashes in them, >> which >> is what prefix matching treats them as. > > Apache matches prefixes with Alias. It does not require > directories, it > doesn't care about the existence of intermediate directories. It > doesn't even care about slashes (though I find that behavior > unhelpful).
Apache does care about slashes at least when it is mapping request against the filesystem. Specifically, the builtin module mod_dir runs a handler as last thing in the fixup handler phase and if the URL maps to a directory but the URL doesn't have a trailing slash, then the module will return a redirect response to force the browser to perform the request again but with a trailing slash. The problem is that Python based frameworks which use mod_python as merely a jumping off point tend not to perform this trailing slash redirection in any meaningful way when mapping URLs against any sort of Python object structures. Even mod_python.publisher, the layer provided on top of the mod_python core is flawed in this respect. Graham _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
