Media/Device Type Spec???

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 10:43, Dave Cridland wrote:
> On Fri Aug 20 08:15:07 2004, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2004-08-19 at 13:07, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > > On Thursday 19 August 2004 12:03, Dave Cridland wrote:
> > > > The upshot of this is that some service types are more specific
> > > > versions of others, potentially. How compatible do you think 
> > this
> > > > concept is with existing usage of KDE's service types?
> > > > Wrt to more specific versions of others, we have service type 
> > inheritance > which allows to create specialized service types.
> > > > We don't have a good solution for the "http-URI is actually 
> > subversion" > problem. For WebDAV we have created a separate 
> > webdav-URI to be able to > distinguish the different capabilities 
> > in comparison to common http.
> > 
> > We have the same issue in gnome. For this particular issue we added 
> > dav:
> > and davs:
> 
> My problem with that is threefold:
> 
> 1) It breaks the useful ability to be able to throw a Subversion HTTP 
> URI at the webbrowser, or an innocent person.

Only sort of. The http:// code also handles webdav, in fact they use the
same code. However, if you use dav: uris you can't give those to anyone.

> 2) 'dav' scheme is registered, but means something else, 'davs' is 
> not. [dav: is a URN used for XML namespacing]

This is wrong. dav: is registred both as a xml namespace and as a uri
scheme, see http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes. 

> 3) Finally, it's not a generic solution - there's an increasing 
> number of protocol overloads being defined based on DAV. 'Defining' 
> URI schemes for each of them fragments the URI space, and prevents 
> them from being treated as plain DAV or HTTP, both of which being 
> useful properties, and, one would hope, the reason they're defined as 
> being HTTP/DAV overloads.

Sure. But the splitting is probably not needed for any of these in
practice. Since none of these protocols are used for file-system storage
they are not interesting to gnome-vfs, and its unlikely that you'll find
links to them in desktop files or emails/webpages/etc where you expect
clicking on it to open in anything but a webbrowser.

Basically, I gree with your points, but in practice it was a pretty
badly needed change. We have this vfs-uri thing (that is not exactly a
w3c uri, but very similar), and we have a system that uses it. We have
to set up default handlers for http:// uris so that if you click on them
you get your default webbrowser. Only, this breaks if you use http://
uris in e.g. desktop file links to dav shares (you want those in your
file manager, not your webbrowser), so the practical thing to do was to
make dav: uris plain aliases to http: (this was also according to spec,
see above). Later davs: was added for the same reason.


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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an uncontrollable sweet-toothed stage actor haunted by memories of 'Nam. 
She's a plucky African-American Valkyrie from a family of eight older 
brothers. They fight crime!