weird index.love??

[jscheuer1]

I repeat, the request URI passed to the server needn't be the path to an actual file. It can be whatever the server wants it to be. For example, in Django, there's an urls.py file which contains a list of regexes and functions (all in one file, views.py) to associate with them. When the regex is matched in a request URI, the function is called with the regex's captures as arguments, and the result of the function is displayed to the browser.

Just out of curiosity then, under those circumstances, what is displayed in the address bar? Is it the user entered/link URI or the URI of the resource/page fetched?

[Twey]

No, you're looking it in completely the wrong way.

When a request is sent to the server, the URI line looks something like this:

GET /path/to/file.html HTTP/1.1

That "/path/to/file.html" is just a string. It's entirely up to the webserver what to do with it. It may decide to use that to look for a file called file.php on the server's hard drive, or it may do something totally different; it might, for example, connect to a remote site and download some data from there, or run a script, or contact a device (a webcam or some such thing).

The browser's address bar shows the URL of the current location. Unless a redirect status code is returned, that doesn't change. The real data, though, can come from anywhere: there's no guarantee that the URL reflects the layout of the server's hard drive, or even that the webserver is reading from the hard drive at all.