Links to a subfolder (not a file) get rewritten

If I have some navigation links within a library item and they are hyperlinks to a subfolder

e.g.

<a href="../example/">example </a>

then Dreamweaver will rewrite this to

<a href="../example">example </a>

i.e. it removes the trailing space and makes the link look like it is going to a single page rather than a directory. Also if you do have a page with that name it will be loaded instead of the intended directory.

Is there any way to stop this from happening?

Google will see these are two separate URLs and so it is bad for SEO.

I could just avoid this by linking to "../example/index.html" but that is ugly and means that any future change to, for example .php, would mean changing all the links.