Strange URL Behaviour

I'm wondering how sites these days are managing their content and AJAX calls.

How is it that Facebook is able to have a URL like:
http://www.facebook.com/zuck

without with / on the end of zuck like
http://www.facebook.com/zuck/

This is obviously really handy as they don't actually need to create a sub-directory called zuck.

I noticed as well that places like http://hypem.com/popular is doing it too. Convenient for them as they're able to run their media player without breaks and they don't need to to have a # in their URL.

In all honesty I can't say I know a whole lot about what those specific sites are doing and how their system is setup and designed to work.

Obviously you can leave the trailing slash in a URL of a folder off and it will still load, but as a redirect (which is slower) and typically you'll see the slash added once the request has succeeded. But other than that, a URL with no trailing slash typically means it'd be pointing to a file rather than a folder. But that doesn't mean you can just go take extensions off your pages because they'll load as plain text in a browser rather than a webpage.

I've heard of .htaccess 'tricks' that can redirect to index pages without adding a trailing slash but I don't really know much about that. Other than those few things I can't really tell you much. Obviously avoiding the use/need of sub-directories is a better way to go and so perhaps there is some 'trick' to getting a file (lacking an extension) to somehow redirect or load content which would give the desired result.

It's all about the .htaccess

Try redirecting to the URL you want...then you should get that result.

I would have to think the end bit is not a link "zuck", probably just a unique identifier parsed from the string then retrieved from a database.

Not sure about Ajax but PHP and Python do this sort of thing with ease.



Dan