- From: <S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 17:07:09 +0100 (BST)
- To: masinter@parc.xerox.com (Larry Masinter)
- Cc: heaney@cambridge.scr.slb.com, www-talk@w3.org
Larry Masinter wrote: > > > Is there a standard solution (the URL RFC 1738 isn't clear > > on this) or is it simply a browser implementation issue (Cyberdog > > for example requests a username and password if anonymous fails). It's a shame that some browser manufacturers didn't bother for follow the specification. :-( I found that the syntax itself perfectly clear: ftp://<user>:<password>@<host>/<url-path> eg. ftp://username:password@hostname/path/to/object It's just the interpreation of the <url-path> that's the problem. The implementation in Netscape (up to and including version 3 and possibly other browsers) diverges with the contents of RFC1738 since they tend to pass the / that separates the host:port part from the <url-path> part as part of the first path component. Hence all files are referenced from the root directory visible to logged in user. ie. ftp://username:pw@some.machine/etc/motd would attempt to read /etc/motd rather than requiring a %2F before the 'etc'. The result is that users cannot build URLs that reference the given user's "home directory" on UNIX FTP servers and maybe others too. > I think this is an area where current implementations diverge, and that > we need to recycle the 'ftp:' scheme as a 'proposed standard' in order > to get some convergence on it. Surely there's no need to recycle the FTP scheme - just persuade Netscape and others to fix their buggy products ... it's not as if people can use non-anon FTP safely with it anyway. -- Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/
Received on Tuesday, 19 August 1997 12:09:40 UTC