[Bug 1131] LinkChecker should behave sensibly for news:// and irc:// URIs

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1131


ville.skytta@iki.fi changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |ot@w3.org
             Status|NEW                         |ASSIGNED




------- Additional Comments From ville.skytta@iki.fi  2005-02-23 18:03 -------
Link checker's URI scheme/protocol support comes from the libwww-perl library. 
At least in theory, all schemes supported by it should be also supported in the
link checker.  Now, regarding the cases from your example URL:

news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.svg
This URI is not RFC1738 compliant.  There's no hostname part in news: URIs
according to the RFC.  Maybe it should be nntp://...?

news:netscape.public.mozilla.svg
This looks ok, but the link checker @ qa-dev.w3.org does not have a default NNTP
server configured.  Olivier, is there one @w3.org or somewhere we (c|sh)ould use
for qa-dev and v.w.o?

As far as I know, there's no standard for irc:// URIs.  That's probably why it
isn't supported in libwww-perl (and consequently nor in link checker).  I
suggest you contact the libwww-perl authors if you feel it should be supported.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/draft-mirashi-url-irc-01.txt (expired 8 years ago)

Finally, news: and nntp: URIs are not too well supported in libwww-perl.  In
particular, they will only work sufficiently for link checker use for URIs that
identify an article; the implementation for URIs identifying a newsgroup is
pretty incomplete.  Yes, that means that even if the news->nntp "bug" would be
fixed and a default NNTP server configured for qa-dev and v.w.o, your URIs (both
of which identify a newsgroup, not an article) wouldn't be completely supported
by libwww-perl (nor link checker) at the moment.

(This made me remember that I have some patches that I should send to
libwww-perl upstream, those make the nntp support a bit better.)

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2005 18:05:37 UTC