Re: Absolute "file:" URLs under Windows95

I tried the following URI in the location/open file input box of the
following browsers.  It worked in all of them except Amaya 2.4; those which
preferred another form (HotJava and MSIE) automatically translated it.

file:///D:/Web/html/index.htm

Platform: Win98

MSIE 5.0
Mozilla 5 Milestone 9 release
Netscape 4.70
Netscape 3.0
HotJava
Lynx 2.8.2
NCSA Mosaic 3.0

I would suggest that the preferred behavior for Amaya 2.4 (where the URI
failed) would be to behave as MSIE, to automatically convert a file URI to a
Windows pathname under the Windows environment.  Note that I wasn't able to
get Mozilla to accept a standard pathname without the file:/// protocol
(obviously the older Netscapes didn't); this, too, I'd call an undesirable
behavior.

Patrick Rourke

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc Rubin, Jay's Island Software Development & Consulting"
<amayalist@mail.com>
To: <www-amaya@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2000 9:35 AM
Subject: Absolute "file:" URLs under Windows95


> For a link to a local file on another hard drive, is there any href format
> usable by most popular browsers?
>
> Amaya creates and accepts a format without the "file:" keyword, for
example:
>
> <a href="P:\USRMODEM\readme.html">US Robotics</a>
>
> However, this format is not accepted by Netscape. My goal is to create a
> local "homepage" usable by MS Internet Explorer, Netscape, Lynx, and
Amaya.
>
> For a local absolute URL, Netscape expects the "file:" keyword in a format
> such as:
>
> <a href="file://P|/USRMODEM/readme.html">US Robotics</a>
>
> For this format, Amaya reports a leading slash in its status-line error:
> "Cannot load \P|/USRMODEM/readme.html"
>
> Amaya also reports errors for all variations which I've tried, including a
> colon instead of the vertical line, reversed slashes, escaped special
> characters, and a different number of leading slashes. Amaya interprets
some
> of these cases as a relative URL.
>
> Unless I've missed some universally accepted format for absolute URLs to
> local files, would it be appropriate for Amaya to accept the format used
by
> Netscape?
>

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2000 09:57:39 UTC