I’m not sure what the industry standard (if there is one) for object storage is for odd pseudo-folder cases that can’t happen in a normal filesystem. Basically, you can but slashes anywhere, but what do they do?
Wasabi “The requested folder does not exist” #4696 wants bucket root. Should Path be a forward slash?
Backup files missing on Wasabi (cited earlier) found that tools such as Cyberduck got confused by slash.
Keys with double slashes are invisible #6757 (Cyberduck) rejected supporting those, citing S3 examples.
No files with the backup prefix duplicati, but found the following backup prefixes: uplicati #4711 (on Storj) used a leading forward slash, and that confused things.
The same questions could potentially arise for any object storage pseudo folders, not just S3 compatible.
When planning solutions, maintaining ability to reach whatever wound up as the key was mentioned, but there’s also a command line to worry about, where anything can be typed, and user interaction is limited.
I’d also point out that double slash means different things. If in a URI, I’d guess one gets stripped off, so from a key point of view it’s a singled leading slash. On the other hand, you can double slash in the path, but that’s a more obvious thing to not do. Whether or not GUI Path needs leading slash is not very clear.
Generally I advise no extra leading or trailing slashes. I think that’s the maybe-unstated GUI Path intent.