Re: URI Scheme that needs help.

Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> 
> 
> I consider this kind of relative reference to be difficult and quite
> possibly harmful in protocols.

Please keep in mind that the protocols involved have existed for a long
time.  The best I can do is provide the most sensible URI scheme.

> It's fine to use in a user-interface as
> a shortcut, but there had better be a good reason why the URL isn't
> canonicalized so as not to contain ".." before appearing over the
> wire.   Even relative references that don't use ".." -- e.g.  absolute
> paths -- may be difficult.

The ".." would not appear over the wire.  It's a decision the User Agent
would make.

> If the scope is limited to use within one stored document and that
> document's base URL (e.g. a Web page), relative references work well
> enough and solve the problem of moving around hierarchies of documents
> without changing all the references within.  Part of the reason that
> works is that the whole document is used entire, so some kind of
> relative reference consistency is possible.  I don't see that's the case
> for this kind of URI yet, or what use case relative references would
> solve for this type of URI.

SMB is a filesharing protocol so the content of any stored document is not
really relevant.  Many of the files referenced won't be parsable by the User
Agent.

> Some of the problems found:
>  - Possible to lose the "base URL" or disagree about what it is or have
> several possible referents (see http://w3future.com/weblog/2005/08/ for
> an example in Atom)
>  - URI matching use cases difficult or broken
>  - poor implementation track record outside of HTML use

I think we're off track here.  I've done, it seems, a poor job of explaining
how the underlying protocol already works and how this scheme is intended to
map to that existing set of semantics.

I'm hoping one of my earlier messages will clear some of this up, but it's
an important point so please keep the discussion going.  I appreciate it!

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh@ubiqx.mn.org
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Received on Friday, 12 January 2007 00:10:02 UTC