Re: LYNX-DEV /foo/.. ?

[Foteos Macrides]

Klaus Weide <address@hidden> wrote:
>[...]
>The ":" shouldn't be a problem here, it is allowed in path segments
>by both RFCs.  There would be a problem if a *relative* URL started
>with "c:" because that would look like the scheme part of an absolute
>URL. (Section 5.3 of RFC 1808 has advice on what to do if this is
>really wanted).
>
>> file:///c|/lynx/bookmark.htm
>[...]

        On VMS, which similarly has device: in it's file system, we
require that the first symbol in the path for file URLs be a symbolic
or physical device, without the colon on its end (so you don't mix
two kinds of "punctuation").  A lot of headaches would be avoided if a
similar requrirement were imposed for DOS, rather than relying on a
non-ASCII character ('|' or ':') that technically requires hex escaping.
When system file specs are used as a startfile or in a 'g'oto, the
VMS translation function does an expansion if necessary, and creates
a full URL path beginning with the device.  If you do that, you can be
more confident that partial HREFs will be resolved properly.

        For URLs on VMS ftp servers, we instead treat the first symbolic
element as a file or subdirectory under the login directory, and treat
a lead %2F as a "switch" for instead treating the first symbolic element
as a device.  You don't have that luxury for DOS (Novell?) ftp servers,
'cuz they don't use their native file system in their listing, but have
a (bad) emulation of Unix file specs.  The current Lynx ftp gateway
does appear to cope with those listings reliably, but I have no idea
what happens with non-anonymous ftp on such servers.

        I also don't know what MSIE or NSN are doing for file URLs
for Windows PCs, and whether they do the same thing, and whether it
might be just as well do emulate their behavior on direct DOS PCs.

                                Fote

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 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
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