Hi,
I was just browsing YouTube when I thought that how do you know what language it is in.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=uFwO1kWeSQs

That's an example of a youtube url. How can anyone tell what language it's in.

The other thing that makes me think is how can it not have a trailing slash. I have seen quite a few pages that are like www.site.com/users/username

I know it's not an important question but it just makes me think. Does any know how it works as I am pretty sure that the url without the slash is not a directory as it would have a slash.

Many sites have this method or pages, veoh, youtube, mininova are some.

Can anyone tell me what it is and what does youtube do to hide its language?

Thanks.

I'm not sure YouTube cares much about hiding the language, but their site is definitely more user friendly without the trailing extension.

YouTube is hosted on Apache, which means they are rewriting the URLs inside of a .htaccess file (unless there is another way to do it, I'm not sure). Here is a guide to URL rewriting on Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

A URL to a directory does not need a trailing slash as the webserver will automatically redirect to the trailing slash version

so site.tld/folder or site.tld/folder/ are equally correct as URIs