Re: Status of ftp:///?

Larry Masinter wrote:
> At some point in the past, I volunteered to take on the
> "file:" draft, but I got distracted. 
> 
> My hope was that we could produce a document that contained
> an informational component ("what current file: URI 
> interpreters do today") with a survey of current
> implementations, and some informational guidelines
> ("what future file: URI generators could do to
>  be maximally compatible") and then end with some
> normative text
> ("what future file: URI interpreters should do").
> 

I like all of those things, but would settle for some subset, for now,
if I had to.

> My hope would be to progress this along standards track,
> i.e., aim for DRAFT or even FULL standard. The 'protocol'
> itself meets the criteria for full standard, so we should
> be able to write a document that would stand in that
> status.
> 
> I think we got into controversy because people were confusing
> what I propose as informational parts and thinking that
> they would have to be normative. 

When it came up before, there were some strong feelings about whether or not 
the new draft should be normative. There was disagreement as to the value of 
producing an RFC that says nothing but "here's the current situation with file 
URIs: FUBAR" versus going a bit further and making some recommendations for 
producers and consumers of 'file' URIs.

I don't think there should be any rush to get *something* published, just so 
we can put the final nail in RFC 1738's coffin. Consensus on this scheme is 
hard to achieve, so it deserves a lot of deliberation and input from as many 
people as possible. That's partly why I privately advocated doing the initial 
draft development as a wiki, so we aren't wasting energy writing up 
line-by-line comments about typos and phrasing and missing info; interested 
parties would make their own changes directly, contentious edits would be 
quickly reverted, and parallel discussions could occur on the list or on the 
associated discussion page, as in Wikipedia. I think it would alleviate the 
difficulty we're having in getting the ball rolling, and keeping editors from 
tearing their hair out trying to accommodate everyone's contributions, some 
of which trickle in rather late.

Speaking of which, the Wikipedia article on URIs [1] is still a work in 
progress. I recently added a history section, in an effort to help
clarify the relationship between URIs and URLs, so that I could then
rewrite the URL article [2]. However, I haven't gotten around to touching
the URL article, which is currently piecemeal and quite ugly, IMHO. As
Wikipedia is increasingly becoming a reference source, it'd be great if
some more experts from this list could get on there and make whatever
changes they see fit.

-Mike

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator

Received on Monday, 23 May 2005 19:46:00 UTC