What is a trailing slash?
The Web’s standards say (links and full quotes): The trailing path segment delimiter “/” represents an empty last path segment. Normalization should not remove delimiters when their associated component is empty. (Read the polite “should” as “must”.) To understand that, lets look at the most common URL components: scheme:// server-name.tld /path ?query-string #fragment The (red) path part begins with a forward slash “/” and must consist of at least one byte (the trailing slash itself in case of the home page URL http://example.com/). If an URL ends with a slash, it points to a directory’s default document, or, if there’s no default document, to a list of objects stored in a directory. The home page link lacks a directory name, because “/” after the TLD (.com|net|org|…) stands for the root directory. Automated directory indexes (a list of links to all files) should be forbidden, use Options -Indexes in .htaccess to send such requests to your 403-Forbidden page. In order to set default f
