[Zope-dev] ZServer should redirect for folder objects?

[John Lim]

Hi,

I've been doing some work with Zope and I've noticed strange behavior with 
regards to ZServer and relative links.

When a client requests an object that is a folder and the request URL does 
not have a trailing slash, the HTTP server should return an HTTP 301 
Redirect to the correct URL with the slash, right?

As an example, if I'm connecting to an Apache server:

[headers not relevant to this discussion have been removed]

$ lynx -head -dump http://some.apache.server/admin
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix)
Location: http://some.apache.server/admin/
Content-Type: text/html

$ lynx -head -dump http://some.apache.server/admin/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix)
Content-Type: text/html

This is why if you send a request for http://some.apache.server/admin, when 
your client is done loading the URL, it will actually show 
http://some.apache.server/admin/.

However, ZServer doesn't seem to follow this behavior:

$ lynx -head -dump http://some.zope.zserver/admin
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Zope/Zope 2.3.3 (binary release, python 1.5.2, solaris-2.6-sparc) 
ZServer/1.1b1
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://some.zope.zserver/admin/

$ lynx -head -dump http://some.zope.zserver/admin/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Zope/Zope 2.3.3 (binary release, python 1.5.2, solaris-2.6-sparc) 
ZServer/1.1b1
Content-Type: text/html

Note that ZServer is returning:
a) an HTTP 200 response
b) a "Content-Location" header

I looked up RFC 1945 (the HTTP/1.0 specification), and could not find any 
mention of "Content-Location". Only "Location" is defined.

However, I also looked up RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), and there is mention of 
"Content-Location" there. But ZServer tells the client that it's talking 
HTTP/1.0, and yet returns a header from HTTP/1.1, so I believe this is 
incorrect behavior?

This is important for relative links -- try this in ZServer. Make a /test 
directory, and put an <A HREF> tag linking to another file in that 
directory. E.g.

/test/index_html:

<A HREF="relative.html">relative link</A>

Now, try loading up http://some.zope.zserver/test. Since ZServer does not 
redirect you, the URL remains as http://some.zope.zserver/test, and your 
link is incorrectly rendered by your client as 
http://some.zope.zserver/relative.html.

But if you load http://some.zope.zserver/test/, the link comes out as 
http://some.zope.zserver/test/relative.html, which is right.

Comments?

Thanks!

---
  John Lim