Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 20:03 +0100, Alex Jones wrote:
> Hi list
> 
> On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 11:26 -0400, Dimi Paun wrote:
> > On Thu, September 21, 2006 10:47 am, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > One solution would be to use some other prefix than / for
> > > non-local files, and to use some form of escaping only for non-utf8
> > > chars and non-printables. This works since we only handle absolute
> > > pathnames, so anything not starting with / is out of band.
> > 
> > I think this is a sippery slope -- a new form of URI which is
> > the same but a bit different will be very confusing. I took the
> > general population 10 years to grok a tiny bit of the URI concept,
> > and most people still don't get it.  The techinical points about
> > escaping and so on are so foreign to most folks that they will
> > be utterly confused (and very annoyed) that they can't enter
> > an unescaped URI.
> > 
> > I agree that the fully escaped URI is insane for an interface
> > with the user. That's clearly just an internal notation. Howerver,
> > for folks that understand URI enough to type them directly in
> > text (which is very seldom even for people that do understand
> > them simply because they are usually long enough that typos are
> > very likely), we can just simply accept improper URIs unescaped
> > and escape them internally ourselves. Whatever we do, this is not
> > really a use case that's common, no need to optimize for it.
> 
> IRI's can be used for this. IRIs are directly mapped to URIs by
> escaping.

IRI's look interesting. They are basically the same as the "unescaped
utf8 uris" i gave as an example above, but formalized.

I see that there has been no update to the lastest verson of the draft,
even if it expires 31 May 2005. Does anyone know the status of this?
Furthermore, how well supported are IRIs by other apps?

One problem i see with IRIs is that they still mandate escaping of
characters like "<", ">", '"', Space, "{", "}", "|", "\", "^", and "`".
Especially the Space part might be unexpected by users. Although we can
allow input of these and auto-escape.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a hate-fuelled gay dog-catcher who hides his scarred face behind a mask. 
She's a bloodthirsty belly-dancing bodyguard in the witness protection 
program. They fight crime!