Re: user friendly uri names

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 18:14, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> 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. 

Sorry.  I really really suck at terminology.  GNOME-VFS can use these
"plugins", and I'm fairly sure the API uses "uri" in it, so I just
assumed these were a form of URI, if not one standardized across the
whole of the Internet...

>   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:

Indeed, it should be applications:///Office/.  Consider it a typo. 
(even if it was me being stupid as usual)  ^,^

>     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

It works mostly as you want.  Just me being stupid, not gnome-vfs. 
Sorry for the confusion...

Except I noticed if I type in
"applications:/moonweaver//Preferences/System"  (moonweaver is my
server), I get an error message: Couldn't find
"applications:///moonweaver/Preferences/System". Please check the
spelling and try again."

I'm not sure what's going on there, but leaving the URI (or whatever
name I should be using) as is and simply replying that remote servers
are not supported with the applications protocol/plugin would be a
better idea.

> 
> Daniel
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.