Re: user friendly uri names

[Michael Toomim <toomim uclink4 berkeley edu>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   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.

Yeah, what's the deal?  Conceptually, "applications" is a container (ie. 
directory) not a protocol, and "Office" is a subcontainer of "applications".

This should really be something like Applications/Office.  Or maybe 
/Applications/Office.  Or maybe Gnome/Applications/Office, or at least 
gnome://Applications/Office or gnome:///Applications/Office (however 
many slashes you prefer).

As it stands, the vfs interface is really inconsistent.  The user has to 
remember that some containers reside in file://, some containers are 
actually protocols and must be specified with protocol://, and some 
containers actually live inside of those protocol containers!  Why, dear 
god?

Is gnome saying that MSDOS had it right when they assigned all disk 
drives their own idiosynchratic top-level A:, B:, .. labels?

Not to mention that all those slashes and colons are annoying in and of 
themselves.  Is gnome really forcing users to remember to type THREE 
forward-slashes?  This is user-friendly how?  So let's see.. the first 
slash means nothing, the second slash (when used in conjunction with the 
first slash) signals the end of the the "protocol" section, and the 
third identical slash means that the next word in the uri will specify a 
container on the local computer rather than a foreign server.  Should 
users also be forced to learn C++?  And some uri's (like 
mailto:foobar foo bar) don't have any slashes at all -- just a colon.

I'm saying this from the perspective of not having read rfc2396, because 
I don't think that gnome's users are expected to read that document either.