[Clipart] Thumbnails in clipart packages

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:

>>  * use clipart:// as the URI scheme for files inside a clipart
>>    package (analogous to file:/// for files on the filesystem).
>
> Creating new pseudo protocols is EVIL!!!
> It is still a file, please use file:///

It's a file, but for that matter a file you retrieve via http or ftp
is still a file.  The point is, file:/// defines itself to be rooted
at the root of the filesystem; in this case, there is no filesystem,
because the file is in an archive that's being transferred over the
internet.  When the files are extracted, we have very little idea
which part of the filesystem they'll be extracted to.  The file:///
URI could be file:///D:/images/clipart/foo.png just as well as
file:///home/luser/clipart/foo.png

I suppose we could pretend that the archive will be extracted into the
root directory and use the URI file:///clipart/foo.png , but that
seems to me like it implies that the archive should be extracted in a
certain place, a place that doesn't even make sense on some
platforms.

Is there an existing pseudoprotocol for specifying the location of a
file within an archive?  If there is, we could reuse it.

Come to think of it, there really ought to be a standard
pseudoprotocol for that, but I don't know of one.

-- 
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,"ten.thgirb\@badanoj$/ --";$\=$ ;-> ();print$/