Re: file://localhost => local: ?

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Mon, 21 Mar 1994 19:31:25 --100

In message <94Mar21.101133pst.2732@golden.parc.xerox.com>, Larry Masinter write
s:
..
>Another more serious problem is that many HTML documents on the net
>still use 'file:' instead of 'ftp:'. To get this to work with the
>proxy gateway, I set things up so that
..
>Personally, I'd like to see a totally different URL constructed to
>mean 'file on the client's workstation' for use with lynx, Mosaic,
>etc. to get rid of the ambiguity. I propose using:
>
> local:<local-host-pathname>
>
>What do you think?

I suggest the name "local-file" with semantics as defined by MIME.

I suggest the name "anon-ftp" be supported as well.

I think the semantics of URLs and MIME external bodies should be
the same, and in this vein, it is important that they share
namespaces. i.e. it would be a Bad Thing if a URL scheme and a MIME
access type had the same spelling but different meanings. For the same
reasons, I think it's a Bad Thing for the same mechanism to have
different names under MIME and WWW.

Dan