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Keep it clear and simple - use the full path!
So, for future-proofing purposes, you should try to ensure that all external links point to directries rather than pages. This will not always be possible, but if you follow this rule you may save yourself a lot of work in the future. I always check new links and ask for them to be changed if they point to pages.
Kaled.
point taken - but it's not clear what he is intending to point to. I took it to be 'something.html' in the root. I agree that if he means the default file in a directory called /something/ that's o.k.
But if he's thinking this way, then the first path he provided wouldn't make any sense at all!
However, not too long ago Google stopped indexing "/index.html", treating links to that URL as links to "/". Slurp looks like it does the same, but Scooter, ia_archiver, FAST-WebCrawler and msnbot treat them differently.
This is a mess, so I now aim to stick to /something/ in preference to /something and /something/index.html for the benefit of any robots that might make guesses about the content behind URLs.
If, as is often the case, /something is some kind of redirect to /something/ then I would certainly prefer to link to /something/
You should be consistent in your site's internal linking, though, and above all, inbound links should be, too.
Avoid being linked as '/something/' and internally linking to /something/index.html.
