'file' URI scheme

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sun, 2008-03-30 at 17:14 -0500, Luke -Jr wrote:
> On Sunday 30 March 2008, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > >file:///etc;foo/config;bar/some.conf;hi
> >
> > What parameters?
> 
> Section 3.3 of RFC 2396 (Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax)
[...]

> The URI RFC, while it does not define the application of parameters in file 
> URIs, does define that "The parameters are not significant to the parsing of 
> relative references.", which I read as meaning that "..;foo/bar" acts the 
> same as "../bar". Following this logic, it would seem the "proper" thing to 
> do in a file URI is to ignore unrecognized parameters and map my example 
> to /etc/config/some.conf

I don't think there's a proper thing to do here. Luckily such
URI syntax seems unused, in general, except for when the
parameter is at the end, file://a/b;encoding=UTF-8, and then it should
certainly be ignored in terms of resolving the filename.

But a file: implementation that mapped the parameters to filenames could
still, as I read the spec, be conforming, so file://etc;a=3/profile
could indeed result in a search for a file called "/etc;a=3/profile
and be neither more nor less useful in practice.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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