RE: Some clarification on file URLs

The 'file' scheme is terribly underspecified. Over the years,
various persons have volunteered to write an update.

Most recently, in March
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2003Mar/0043.html)
Dan Kohn and Paul Hoffman volunteered to scope the work
and take on some of it, and on May 2
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2003May/0016.html
Paul said that it was on his schedule for "this weekend".


Perhaps you could help them. My suggestion for a writeup
of "file:" is that the document might

 - examine what various current URI interpreters do
   on various platforms
   (IE, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Java, Perl on
   Windows 98/ME/2K/XP vs. Mac vs. Linux)

 - recommend common platform-independent practice

I think this is the most practical guidance to give.
It's not a good idea to try to get the browser makers
to change much at this date, unless the intersection
of 'what works' is empty.

A little Google searching turned up some interesting
references...

  http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/lib/URI/file.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wss/wss/_ex
ch2k_the_file_url_scheme.asp
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/networking/testing/filetests.html



Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2003 01:07:04 UTC