[pmwiki-users] Putting ".html" extensions onto pages

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 07:37:40AM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2006-02-28  06:17 PM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >Does anyone envision any issues with simply having PmWiki ignore
> >trailing ".html" extensions in url requests by default...?  If not,
> >then it's likely to be included in the next beta release.
> 
> What does it mean to say that PmWiki is going to ignore the 
> extension? Isn't it the web server that interprets the extension to 
> decide how to dispatch the request? In other words, won't the web 
> server have to ignore the extension too? 

In the normal case, the webserver doesn't have to do anything
differently here.  Given a url such as

    http://www.example.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WikiSandbox.html

the webserver gets as far as the "pmwiki.php" part (which tells it
to run PmWiki), and then passes the rest along to the script to
be processed.  The same is true for the various clean urls approaches.

> As for being useful for static copies of the pages, if you use 
> HTTrack to capture a static representation, it rewrites the URLs so 
> that they work. No need for this "ignoring" scheme.

Several web scraping utilities do indeed offer options like this, but 
some don't, and some don't work right.  And having it work directly
with browser "off-line caching" features might be a plus.

(Side note:  HTTrack happens to be one of those user-agents that
is completely banned from my server; I've run into a number of cases
where HTTrack is sending 15-20 simultaneous requests for pointless
pages on the system. :-)

Pm