- From: Klaus Weide <kweide@tezcat.com>
- Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 01:50:12 -0600 (CST)
- To: www-lib@w3.org
On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen wrote:
> At 15:54 1/28/99 -0500, Jim_Ravan@avid.com wrote:
>
> >What is the proper syntax for a file: scheme? I have seen
> >file:///dir/subdir/file, but I don't understand why there are three slashes
> >after the initial colon.
Because it's short for file://localhost/dir/subdir/file -
I.e. the string conforms to ge theneral syntax for absolute URLs,
it has a host component, but that happens to be an empty string.
Excerpt from RFC 1738:
As a special case, <host> can be the string "localhost" or the empty
string; this is interpreted as `the machine from which the URL is
being interpreted'.
> >Is there anyway to know whether or not the user intends that the beginning
> >of the path is a physical disk? On a Mac, this matters. On Unix, it's not a
> >problem, obviously. I expect the answer is "no, other than server
> >convention".
>
> Yeah - what I do is using the HTLocalToWWW(...) function defined in
>
> http://www.w3.org/Library/src/HTWWWStr.html
>
> There also is a function to convert from URI format to local disk, it is
> defined in the same module.
>
> On windows the format is rather strange format which seems to work in most
> browsers:
>
> file:/C:/tmp/irc.txt
That should be regarded as just an incomplete form for
file://localhost/C:/tmp/irc.txt.
Lynx uses the forms with file://localhost/ as the primary internal
representation, and tries to convert other forms that may be encountered
to it. If the Library has made a different decision, it should at least
regard the forms with explicit //localhost/ as equivalent. (I haven't
checked whether it does.)
Klaus
Received on Friday, 29 January 1999 02:50:16 UTC