: When subdirectory ends with a slash ('/'), should there still be a period ('.') at the end? When a URL has a subdomain subdirectory (like https://www.example.com/subdomain), does it still need

@Heady270

You are somewhat confused about the different parts of the URL. Let me break them out for you:
www.example.com/path


https is the protocol
www is the subdomain
example.com is the domain name
com is the top level domain
/path is the URL path


How can URLs have a dot . at the end, e.g. bla.de.? is about the domain name ending in a . (example.com.). That situation can happen, but it isn't common, and isn't something most webmasters ever worry about.

The subdomain (www) is always separated from the domain name by a .. So I guess in a sense, the subdomain can "end" in a dot, but that is really just more separation from the domain name. On an internal network where you have your computers DNS "search domain" set as "example.com", you could access www.example.com/ with just www/. The "example.com" part would be assumed. The trailing dot on example.com. tells the DNS system not to use the search domain to be doubly sure that it doesn't assume example.com.example.com. Putting in www./ wouldn't be able to acces your site because it tells the DNS system not to use the search domain and treat www as a top level domain (which would then not be found).

You are free to define the URL path for your website any way that you want as long as you can get your web server to support it. All of the following URL paths would be valid and each would be different:


/path
/path.
/path/
/path.html


The trailing dot has no special meaning there. Most web servers would just treat it as part of the file name.

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