Generic Support for New URI Schemes with Apache?

Does anyone know if the following idea has been explored?  Many
browsers that encounter URIs with unknown schemes will (incorrectly,
I think) treat them as relative URLs.  Often this will give the
server that served the document containing the URI a chance to
respond constructively to the error.   Indeed, server software
could be written to detect this case generically and dispatch
to appropriate remedy URLs for the scheme.

For example, with our work on the "bibp:" scheme, we find that
some clients are hitting our server with "URLs" like 
http://usin.org/bibp:....  We will be using Apache rewrite
rules to provide an appropriate response (soon).   But to deploy
this error handling on other servers would require these
rules to be manually configured in each case.

If Apache had a generic support facility for unknown schemes,
the deployment of new schemes could be simplified considerably.
My questions for the URI WG are this:
(1)  Does anyone know of work in this area?
(2)  If not, would work in this area be welcome?
(3)  If so, what issues need to be addressed?

Robert D. Cameron
Professor of Computing Science
Associate Dean of Appliend Sciences
Simon Fraser University

Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 13:16:50 UTC