Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

["Dimi Paun" <dimi lattica com>]

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.

Complicated URIs like FTP need graphical support to be usable
by mortals (we have server, port, login, password, encoding,
directory, filename). How about we have the backend register
some sort of edit dialog that can present all this information
graphically rather than (just) a textual encoding?

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