URI/File scheme/Notable commentary
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" — 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." — 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." — 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…" would feel profoundly weird to me. — Tim Bray [1]
- Not all RFCs prescribe standards, and this is information that would be profoundly useful to the Internet community. … 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. — John Cowan [2]
RE: What to do about file: (19 August 2004) - Larry Masinter suggests some topics to cover
