Re: now://example.org/car (was lack of consensus on httpRange-14)

On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 11:05:21PM -0400, Champion, Mike wrote:
> That's true, of course.  But I think it misses the point that Micah and
> others are tying to make:  so much of the web folklore, and the client
> programs, and the practical experience of people who have no idea what
> "HTTP" in the URL means, leads all but uber-geeks inexorably to the
> conclusion that "HTTP means I click on it and get something back." 

Hmm, I think non-uber-geeks and uber-geeks alike think that the
presence of any URI implies that they can "click on it and get
something back".  This holds for "ftp", "mailto", "telnet", "news",
and any other URI scheme I can think of, not just http.  Browsers don't
have to warn a user that they're clicking on a mailto or ftp URI,
because they don't need to; users treat URIs uniformly, independant of
their scheme.  All they expect is that dereferencing is safe (incurs no
obligations), and that some information is returned that relates to what
they just clicked on, be it a telnet session to some host, an email
composition box, or the weather in Oaxaca.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2002 00:17:25 UTC