[foaf-dev] beyond foaf:mbox_sha1sum

[Steve Harris]

On 22 Dec 2009, at 12:55, Norman Gray wrote:
> Warning. The use of domain URI without a trailing slash, the  
> convention as per http examples states that : http://www.google.com  
> is not sociable and should have a trailing slash
>
> I've never heard of this convention, or of the idea that a URI is or  
> is not 'sociable' because of the presence or absence of the  
> redundant and not-required trailing slash.  Can you elaborate?  The  
> link in the warning message is to <http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_Ex_HTTP.html 
> >, which only lists a number of example URIs (that's a _very_ old  
> page, by the way).

I'm not Mischa, but I feel very strongly about this, so I'll reply as  
well.

Without some convention in this area we make FOAF processors jobs a  
lot harder. The Addressing page is very old, but so are URIs.

When we looked, the majority of URIs in FOAF used the normalised form  
(with a trailing /) as in the Addressing document, so I would think it  
would be best to conform to that.

The alternative would be to resolve "http:/google.com" and see what it  
forwards to, and using what 30x directives, but that opens another can  
of worms.

N.B.

GET  HTTP/1.0
on google.com:80 returns a 404 error, so at least in that case it's an  
incorrect URI. It's probably an invalid HTTP request also, but I can't  
be bothered to look to be honest :)

GET / HTTP/1.0
from the US returns a 200, which would make http://google.com/ a valid  
google URI
from the UK I get a 302 pointing to http://www.google.co.uk/

So, nowhere do I see a justification for identifying Google's homepage  
with "http://www.google.com".

- Steve