WWW archive and search engine

[Rich Holmes]

Rick Jansen <rick at sara.nl> writes:
>In message <199608011846.OAA21863 at hydra.syr.edu> you write:
>> I can't see that I'm doing anything wrong.  Does the whole-archive URL
>> (http://www.sara.nl/Archive/Archive.html) fail to work for anyone else?
>
>That URL will fail for everyone, as it's not the URL. The correct URL is:
>
>  http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy 

No, the above URL is not the one I'm referring to.  That one works for
me, but it contains a link which does not.  Quoting from the HTML
source for the above page:

  <a name="Archive">
  <hr>
  <h3>
  <a href=Archive/Archive.html> All Archived messages</a>
  </h3>
  Note that this is a substantial list! (195 kilobyte)

And this morning I finally figured out where the problem lies.
Executive summary: I believe the www.sara.nl server is misconfigured,
or maybe not, but in any case the workaround is to use
"http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy/" instead of
"http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy" (note the only difference is the
trailing "/").

I don't know much about http etc. so I leave the technical details to
those who do, but here are the symptoms: If I go to
"http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy" (presumably meaning
synth-diy/index.html in some directory) Netscape shows that my
location is "http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy".  So what?  Well, if I go
to "http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/synth-dim" (a test page,
synth-dim/index.html in my public-html directory), Netscape shows that
my location is "http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/synth-dim/" -- note the
trailing slash!

The absence of the trailing slash is significant. If I go to
"http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy" and select the link to
"Archive/Archive.html", it tries to go to
"http://www.sara.nl/Archive/Archive.html" -- which doesn't exist.  On
the other hand, if I go to "http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/synth-dim"
and select the link to "Archive/Archive.html", it tries to go to
"http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/synth-dim/Archive/Archive.html" -- which
does exist.

Likewise if I go to "http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy/" and select the
link to "Archive/Archive.html", it tries to go to
"http://www.sara.nl/synth-diy/Archive/Archive.html" -- which does
exist, and it works.

The fact that the above behavior (not showing a trailing "/" in the
location, and incorrectly resolving relative URLs, when "/index.html"
is omitted from the URL) occurs on Rick's page but not on mine nor any
others I know of leads me to suspect the www.sara.nl server is at
fault. 

-- 
- Rich Holmes              
    "Not every tradition, however entrenched, is attractive.  Some
	 should be closed down immediately." -- Miss Manners
  Salt Springs Morris:    <http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/morris/saltsp/>