Re: w3m wouldn't load http://localhost

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Johann Spies <jhspies@adept.co.za> wrote:
>I have apache installed and lynx, netscape and mozilla do not have a
>problem to load http://localhost.
>
>However, links and w3m fails.  Links' error message is: "Host not found"
>and w3m's: "Can't load http://localhost";.
>
>Does this have something to do with apache's configuration?

Does http://localhost/ work? Leaving off the trailing slash only works
because of a collection of ugly hacks, and URLs shouldn't be stated that
way.

When you forget the trailing slash on a directory, web servers
construct a redirection response to add it back in (Apache has a
UseCanonicalName directive which is relevant to how it does this).
However, it's not clear to me that something like http://localhost is
well-defined, since a client which didn't explicitly hack around that
malformed URL would end up sending an HTTP request like 'GET  HTTP/1.1'
(instead of the usual 'GET / HTTP/1.1' etc.), and web servers won't
understand that.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]