For aesthetic reasons (I prefer when there is a strict one-to-one mapping between URL and pages), I do not like the fact that http://www.example.com/index.html and http://www.example.com/ yield the same content with two different URLs. I would like to have http://www.example.com/ as the canonical one.
The obvious solution:
Redirect permanent /index.html /
is wrong (endless loop).
A better solution? It seems surprisingly difficult.