Why does quarto replace index.html with directories

[kieranjmartin]

Description

See this previous quarto issue which describes the problem in more detail.

Basically, when you render quarto on a web server (i.e. not locally), any links of the type "mypath/index.html" will be overwritten to "mypath" instead. This has the consequence that on any server which does not support a redirect from directory to index.html, these links will stop working.

There are real consequences to this: if you are using gitlab's preview function, this behaviour is not enabled (link to gitlab issue describing the problem)
which means that a previewed version of the site will work differently than the published version.

I appreciate that having the directory go to index.html is a web standard, so the failure case is relatively unsual, but I'm not sure I understand the utility of this code at all. What would break if quarto just preserved the links as is?

As a side note, for those of you who have the same use case as me, I eventually fixed this by just adding the following line to my cicd to just turn the code off

sed -i 's/if (window.location.protocol !== "file:")/if (false)/g' docs/_site/site_libs/quarto-nav/quarto-nav.js

Obviously the location of your built site may vary!