Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

["Dimi Paun" <dimi lattica com>]

On Fri, September 22, 2006 10:18 am, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> So, IRIs are better than URIs, but not perfect. They might still be our
> best choice though.

I agree. AFAIU, IRIs will be used mostly for the case when people
want to type the filename directly. Few things to keep in mind:
  -- a small percentage of users will use this. While typing the
     file directly is often requested (and I fall in that camp),
     it is mostly relevant for local file paths.
  -- even if we cover only 90% of filenames with IRIs, it's still
     OK, since the user can always browse to the file in those
     exceptional cases.

Put the two togeter, and you have only a _tiny_ fraction of cases
where we might have problems. For this reason I maintain that we
should stick to well known concepts:
  -- standard naming schemes: IRIs are great, since they behave
     as normal people would expect URI to behave (except maybe
     for the restricted set of chars).
  -- in most (all?) cases where we would be using IRIs, there
     is no ambiguity in allowing even the unallowed IRIs
     chars (like space, etc.) and simply escape them automatically.
     This will make them even more usable to the regular folk.

On the IRI's restricted char set, I would like to point out that
they exist to make IRIs (easily) usable by programs. When _users_
interact with IRIs though (like in the location bar), there is no
ambiguity whatsoever if we lift all such restrictions. For this
reason, users get upset (and rightly so) if they type stuff unescaped
and it doesn't work for reasons that they don't really care about
(or can't even imagine for that matter).

Do I understand correctly that IRIs will be used (by and large) just
in Nautilus location bar and the Open File Dialog location bar?

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi lattica com>
Lattica, Inc.