"If no one has asked for trailing slashes, why introduce a feature which has to be protected forever as backward-compatible?"
Except that stripping out the trailing slash is itself a non-backwards compatible change. It may be OK, but let's be clear. I don't think the browser adds the trailing slash. I believe the webserver redirects to the same URL with slash post-pended if it is unable to find something to handle the URL without the trailing slash. Does anyone know how other frameworks handle this (Rails & Django)? We should also make sure we are consistent with any RFCs.
