typescriptlang.org redirects (no www) generally do not go to the appropriate page

[mcclure]

Note: This repo requests issues be reserved for critical issues and PRs be entered for non-critical issues. For reasons explained below, this problem cannot be addressed with a PR.

Page URL: https://typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/intro.html

Issue: Earlier tonight I filed an issue about some problems me and some friends found with redirects on typescriptlang.org. Our attempts to figure out what was happening were made more difficult by the fact that typescriptlang.org, as opposed to www.typescriptlang.org, does not have full redirects set up to the correct site (www.typescriptlang.org). For example, consider the URL https://typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/intro.html. This redirects to the www.typescriptlang.org front page. The single address https://typescriptlang.org/docs appears to have been special-cased to correctly redirect to its corresponding www version, but no other page on the site does this; all other pages, in my testing, send to the typescriptlang.org front page.

This problem is exacerbated by an unfortunate decision on the part of Chrome (and so possibly some Chrome derivatives— I haven't checked) to start hiding the www. trailer on URLs. So for example if you look at https://typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/intro.html in Chrome, your URL bar will say typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-types.html, a URL which does not work (redirects to front page). While attempting to navigate the typescriptlang site, I found myself repeatedly typing URLs from my desktop (running Chrome) to my laptop (running Firefox), and being mysteriously redirected to the typescriptlang.org front page instead. It took me some time to figure out why this was happening. :(

Expected behavior: URLs on the typescriptlang.org domain should redirect to their exact counterparts on www.typescriptlang.org, not to the front page.

Could this have been a PR? Although as an external dev I am not in a good position to fix this particular type of problem as a PR, I did poke at this repo this evening and found there is in fact a file handling redirects in the TypeScript-Website source. However it makes no mention of the www/no-www split at all. This makes me strongly suspect that no-www->www redirect is in some piece of configuration housed outside this repo, and a PR cannot be attempted.

[mcclure]

👍 it works!