index.php vs index.php/

henryhund

Hey everyone. I've read this site for a while and it is great, but I haven't committed myself enough to classify myself as better than a "newbie."

Anyway, I have a strange problem with one of my codes (view it at http://www.pwndaily.com/portfolio/index.php)

The problem is: when I add a "/" to the end of the index.php url, my stylesheets no longer work. This invalidates my code because I use $REQUEST_URI to figure out exactly which page the user is looking for.

This is just a skeletal outline. I am not certain that this is a PHP problem, but I figured there must be many experienced, helpful people here that (in the case that my PHP is okay and it's something else) could offer me suggestions.

Thanks!

<?php
ob_start();
//include("../includetop.inc");

//detect cookie

$location = explode("/",$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
$specific = $location[3];

if($specific == "feed")
{
	header('Content-Type: text/xml'); 
	echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"iso-8859-1\"?>";
	echo "<rss version=\"2.0\">";
}
else{
	if($specific == "")
	{
		$content = "Here's the index!";
	}
	else
	{
		$sql = "SELECT content FROM portfolio WHERE section = '$specific'";
		$data = mysql_query($sql);

	if(!$data)
	{
		$content = "It seems you have come to a dead end!  If you think this is an error, please drop me a line and let me know.  If not, click back on track!";
	}
	else
	{
		$array = mysql_fetch_array($data);
		$content = $array[0];
	}
}		
	?>
	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Untitled Document</title>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
	<link href="portfolio_style_snowflake.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
	<link href="portfolio_style_fontsize_normal.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
	</head>
	<body> 
	<table border="0" align="center"> 
	  <tr> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
		<td><table align="left" id="header"> 
			<tr> 
			  <td><div id="title">Welcome </div> 
				<div id="description"> to the portfolio of Henry Hund. I appreciate your consideration and look forward to working with you. </div></td> 
			</tr> 
		  </table></td> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
	  </tr> 
	  <tr> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
		<td align="left"><table align="left" id="header"> 
			<tr> 
			  <td id="header_links" width="20%"><a href="index.php/classes">Classes</a></td> 
			  <td id="header_links" width="20%"><a href="index.php/involvement">Involvement</a></td> 
			  <td id="header_links" width="20%"><a href="index.php/experience">Experience</a></td> 
			  <td id="header_links" width="20%"><a href="index.php/aboutme">About Me</a> </td> 
			  <td id="header_links" width="20%"><a href="index.php/resume">R&Eacute;sum&Eacute;</a></td> 
			</tr> 
		  </table></td> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
	  </tr> 
	  <tr> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
		<td> <table align="left" id="side-bar"> 
			<tr> 
			  <td><p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p></td> 
			</tr> 
		  </table> 
		  <table align="left" id="content"> 
			<tr> 
			  <td><?php echo $specific.$content; ?>
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p> 
				<p>&nbsp;</p></td> 
			</tr> 
		  </table></td> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
	  </tr> 
	  <tr> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
		<td><table align="left" id="header"> 
			<tr> 
			  <td id="copyright">test</td> 
			</tr> 
		  </table></td> 
		<td width="60">&nbsp;</td> 
	  </tr> 
	</table> 
	</body>
	</html>
<?php 
}
?>

devinemke

why not simply send the specific page as a GET variable:
http://www.pwndaily.com/index.php?page=classes
http://www.pwndaily.com/index.php?page=involvement
http://www.pwndaily.com/index.php?page=experience
etc...

henryhund

I have done that in the past. But I read somewhere (awhile ago) that coding like that prevents search engines from spidering your pages. Is this still true?

Not that it's a huge deal if a search engine spiders this page, I just want to know how to do this, in case I ever need to.

Thanks!

devinemke

Originally posted by henryhund
... But I read somewhere (awhile ago) that coding like that prevents search engines from spidering your pages

if you are using Apache you can use mod_rewrite to address this issue.

henryhund

Thank you for your responses.

The more I think about this the more I think this is a CSS problem and not a PHP problem. So, I suppose if this thread must be deleted (against the rules?), then I'm okay with that.

But, whether I use mod_rewrite (if it's as hard as sendmail, god help me) or use GET variables, if I add that trailing slash the stylesheets break. I could provide inline (not linked) stylesheets, but then I couldn't make them user-changeable.

Thank you for any more help!

henryhund

Figured it out, thanks for your help devinemke!

This was hardly a PHP problem; it was a rather simple file-system "quirk." Rather, the file-system was working as it should, the programmer (me) wasn't working with it correctly. (the link rel was looking for the CSS file at index.php/name.css)

Thanks.