URL syntax question

Marcelo Magallon (mmagallo@cariari.ucr.ac.cr)
Mon, 24 Oct 1994 07:28:24 -0600 (CST)

Hi there! I have a (silly?) question about URL syntax... Here at my
University we have some http servers, all of them running NCSA's HTTPD
1.3. With Mosaic (I mean, NCSA Mosaic) everything works fine, but when I
use Lynx (Lynx 2.2 on an AIX system) the following URL gives some trouble:

http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo

In fact, the problem is not with this particular URL, but with a partial
URL in the index.html file in ~mmagallo. I have something like

<a href="HTML/html_primer.html">Whatever</a>

Mosaic seems to understand that this is

http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo/HTML/html_primer.html

but Lynx 2.2 gives

http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagalloHTML/html_primer.html

If I start Lynx with the command:

lynx http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo/

instead of

lynx http://www.ucr.ac.cr/~mmagallo

everything goes ok.

Now, the question is, wich URL is the right one, the one with the trailing
/ or the one without it? I've read all the URL documentation I know about
(mostly the documents at NCSA and CERN) and it's not clear (at least to
me) if that / should or shouldn't be there.

(Don't ask why they still use Lynx 2.2... this is the computer center, at
my department, wich is Physics, we use 2.3)

BTW, these pages are under construction, this particular one is a
"Bookmark file" or "Hotlist", so I don't really think you are interested,
but if you want, you're welcome to take a look at them.

Thanks!

Marcelo Magallon
(mmagallo@cariari.ucr.ac.cr)