Re: What to do about file:

Tim Bray scripsit:

> No kidding.  It varies more or less as the number of permutations of 
> useragent * platform, with substantial version variation thrown in.  I 
> can see the thinking behind this, but an RFC that says, essentially, 
> "Internet Explorer on post-4.0 versions on Windows platforms does X, 
> while Gecko-based engines on linux platforms do Y, on Windows platforms 
> do Z, while the popular LWP perl library does W, java.net.URI does U... 
> anyhow, such an RFC would feel profoundly weird to me. -Tim

Not all RFCs prescribe standards, and this is information that would
be profoundly useful to the Internet community.  Maybe it should be
a separate informational RFC, or maybe just an informative section
in the standards-track RFC; that's an editorial question.  But it
would be excellent to have a single reasonably authoritative place
to go, rather to have to run one's own experiments all the time.

This is probably not a part of the system that's really worth standardizing
anyway, since file: is inherently not interoperable.

-- 
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
[T]here is a Darwinian explanation for the refusal to accept Darwin.
Given the very pessimistic conclusions about moral purpose to which his
theory drives us, and given the importance of a sense of moral purpose
in helping us cope with life, a refusal to believe Darwin's theory may
have important survival value. --Ian Johnston