While working on a little project that made a site completely database driven, I realized that Yahoo and MSN incorrectly strip off trailing slashes in URLs (because I started seeing 404 page not found errors in my web logs).
For example, the URL http://www.domain.com/directory/ is linked to as http://www.domain.com/directory from both MSN and Yahoo.
This is bad for two reasons... first of all, it's just plain wrong, the two URLs could in theory be separate documents. Second, it's a waste of bandwidth. Most web servers are configured to add a slash to the end of a URL if there is no file that matches the name, and there *is* a directory with that name via a HTTP redirect. So now, the end user's browser needs to make two requests to the server to get one document.
The reason I figured it out is I *had* directories at one point, but moved to dynamic, database driven content. So the web server wasn't redirecting them with the wrong URL because there was not a directory with that name any longer.
Bad MSN, bad Yahoo... Naughty, boys.
