Re: URIs for the standard output and input streams

On Jan 15, 2008 3:28 PM, Noah Slater <nslater@bytesexual.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 01:45:50PM -0800, Paul Prescod wrote:
> > As a practical note: if one asks one of today's XSLT to read stdin and
> > output it to stdout, would you rather it complained: "I've never heard
> > of the posix URI protocol scheme" or "http://purl.org/posix/stdin
> > returned 404"?
>
> This is misleading, the respective errors messages would be:
>
>   Could not resolve http://purl.org/posix/stdin.
>   Could not resolve std:in.
>
> Both are pretty "wrong" from a users POV and pretty horrendous either
> way.

I am too lazy to fire up various XSLT engines, but I have a few
URL-resolving tools on my desktop that give explicit error messages
for unknown protocols.

> ... The real question you should be asking in this situation is of
> the application designer, "why on earth are you using URIs for
> STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR when these things have a long and solid foundation
> in Unix history of being expressed using shell redirection or special
> devices on the local filesystem?"

That's hardly an argument for using HTTP URIs. Using file:/// URIs
seems fine to me, especially if it were put into an RFC somewhere.

 Paul Prescod