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Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

Here's another one.. In facebook apps settings, if you enter a url ending with a "/", the error message is "The url can't end with a '/'". Can't help but think about that lazy programmer who prefered to shoot an error message rather than fixing it. The irony is that it's often way easier and faster to add a .replace() and fixing it rather than writing , testing and translating the error message.

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http://example.com/page and http://example.com/page/ could be totally different pages... So .replace()'ing could silently cause unexpected breakage.

They shouldn't be. Slash normalization is pretty normal and it's ones of the first things frameworks add.

However, they're probably building to the URL spec which is what they should be doing.

It doesn't matter if some people do slash normalizing. It's not how the web works at the standards-level.

Well, maybe everyone's unawareness of this means the standard is wrong.

No.

A de facto standard? We'll have to ask the committee about that.

They are not allowing the trailing / anyway, so what's the difference?

If you type google.com you don't expect FB to replace it to bing.com without telling you.

/path and /path/ are two totally different things in the standards, just like /path and /path2. Sure in most cases with and without trailing slash gives the same page; but it's not something you can assume.

Same reason why "we don't allow https links" doesn't mean you can just drop the s.

That's not a safe assumption, especially in the presence of a CMS system.

foo.com/bar and foo.com/bar/ (-> foo.com/bar/index.html) can be totally seperate URLs.

You're missing his point. Its a safe assumption in the case that the latter gives you an error pointing you to the former. If the latter was a blank/meaningful response that would make sense, but its not.

You misunderstood OP, the FB error he describe is not about hitting a url "path/" that 301 to "path" and FB not detecting it.

In the uri standards, /path and /path/ are just as different as /path and /path2.

You are describing a developer-oriented UI. Silently doing an automagic .replace() on developer-entered information may cause more infuriation and (importantly) bugs than flagging it as invalid. Devs should not be left blissfully unaware of string format restrictions.

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