Re: user friendly uri names

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 05:20:08PM -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
>  'nother quick (looking at length of this e-mail now, scratch that)
> annoying idea - would something like a user-friendly name to a uri type
> be a good thing?  I.e., if a uri is preferences://, it might be shown to
> the user (say, in the Nautilus uri selector/entry) as "User
> Preferences".  a uri of applications://Office/ migth be shown as
> "Applications Menu/Office".  a uri of camera://HP%20308 (assuming we
> ever get another usable gphoto gnome-vfs plugin) could be shown as
> "Digital Cameras/HP 308".

  Hum, seems I haven't followed that closely enough.
Strings like "camera://HP%20308" or "applications://Office/"
are not URIs. "camera" or "applications" are no protocol schemes
names. If they were that might be mapped onto a category of URI
with "opaque" content. 
  Something like "applications://Office/" is especially bad because
in an URI interpretation "applications" would be the protocol,
"Office" the server to contact for that protocol amd the remaining
"/" path would indicate a query for the root resource on that server.
  Who is allocating those strings ? 
  The very first thing to try to clean up would be to use 3 slashes
in a similar fashion as file:///local_path where the empty server name
indicates the resource is on the local host. At the very least this 
would not block from accessing a photo camera in a remote machine or 
an application running in a remote server:
    camera://laptop/HP%20308
 or applications://scan_server/gimp

  Could people:
    1/ read RFC 2396 this is a very basic an crucial spec for those things
       http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
    2/ fix the :// instead of :/// ASAP ! I may want to be able to burn
       files on a remote server at some point, and fixing the naming scheme
       will key for expressing such possibility
    3/ make minimal control at the URI parsing level in gnome-vfs
       to raise errors as early as possible

Daniel

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