rjohara - 8:36 pm on Mar 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

I looked into this once myself and have since been following Nielsen's recommendation:

[useit.com...]

He advises leaving the / in your HTML, because if you just put (say) mydomain.com/news the server has to perform one more lookup operation to discover that that mydomain.com/news maps to the directory mydomain.com/news/ rather than to a file. This adds a tiny bit to retrieval time. Some people would say this doesn't matter, but it's one of those things: if you chop out ten or fifteen things that cause a tenth of a second delay in loading your page, then people subliminally start noticing that your page loads faster.

And by contrast, any address printed or displayed for human consumption should not include the trailing slash: a reader of the page should just see mydomain.com/news, which is cleaner and easier to remember (the code behind the link can include the trailing slash).