Strange URL Behaviour

[Galway]

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.

[Sup3rkirby]

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.

[NorLine]

It's all about the .htaccess

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

[drunken_dev]

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