URI/File scheme/Notable commentary

File URI related posts to the URI WG mailing list
Here are some of the more interesting discussions and notable quotes relating to file URIs:

'file' URI conventions (13 July 2004) - Mike Brown brings up many issues that complicate the mapping of file system paths to URIs

What to do about file: (19 August 2004) - Paul Hoffman points to a now-expired Internet-Draft that was just RFC 1738's 'file' URI section pulled out into a separate document, and asks about courses of action:
 * Publish it as-is (which would accomplish nothing other than hastening the retirement of RFC 1738)
 * "no" &mdash; Larry Masinter
 * Prescribe what implementations SHOULD do, knowing that such a prescription is bound to break many/most existing implementations
 * "this would be useful if it were accompanied by documentation of the caveats." &mdash; Larry Masinter
 * List many more interpretations that current implementations use, but not say whether or not to do them
 * "I propose a variant of this: list the interpretations known to be in use, labeled with who uses them, in an informative section." &mdash; John Cowan
 * Say more about the wide variety of interpretations, but don't list them so as not to confuse readers

An RFC that says, essentially, "Internet Explorer on post-4.0 versions on Windows platforms does X, while Gecko-based engines on linux platforms do Y, on Windows platforms do Z, while the popular LWP perl library does W, java.net.URI does U&#8230;" would feel profoundly weird to me. &mdash; Tim Bray
 * Not all RFCs prescribe standards, and this is information that would be profoundly useful to the Internet community. &#8230; It would be excellent to have a single reasonably authoritative place to go, rather to have to run one's own experiments all the time. &mdash; John Cowan

RE: What to do about file: (19 August 2004) - Larry Masinter suggests some topics to cover