The Hyperlink Trailing Slash Debate

While I agree leaving off the trailing slash for directory links is inefficient from a technical perspective, I disagree with your recommendation.

For me the resource to conserve is attention, not TCP/IP packets. It is simpler to leave the trailing slash off all links so you don’t waste a second considering whether to include a slash at the end of your link or not, depending on the resource.

I also think a consistent link format is more visually appealing given a list of links. In my view, the trailing slash is superfluous information (i.e. cruft) for the information consumer.

Neat log analysis though.

While I agree leaving off the trailing slash for directory links is inefficient from a technical perspective, I disagree with your recommendation.

For me the resource to conserve is attention, not TCP/IP packets. It is simpler to leave the trailing slash off all links so you don’t waste a second considering whether to include a slash at the end of your link or not, depending on the resource.

I also think a consistent link format is more visually appealing given a list of links. In my view, the trailing slash is superfluous information (i.e. cruft) for the information consumer.

Neat log analysis though.

Tony,

You don’t have to display the trailing slash in the hyperlink. :) You just add it to the href.

Good point, though I was refering to lists of links in plain text (like an email). Now if we could only get rid of the double slash cruft in the protocol declaration (“http://”).

Sir Tim:

“Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?

I would have skipped on the double slash – there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order – in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:uk/org/bcs/members. This would mean the BCS could have one server for the whole site or have one specific to members and the URL wouldn’t have to be different.”

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3337

Have you tried testing this with other servers, such as IIS. I wonder if other servers handle this more, less, or with the same efficiency as Apache.

I always put it there, but not because of any efficiency reasons. If you leave it out, your browser puts it there when the page is pulled up, so suddenly you have to versions of the same url in your history.

I hate typing a url into my address bar and seeing both http://dmiessler.com and http://dmiessler.com/ show up in the auto-complete list.