Re: [gphoto-devel] Camera Access Scheme

[Ole Aamot <ole linpro no>]

Andreas Pour <pour mieterra com> writes:

> David Faure wrote:
> >
> > On Saturday 16 December 2000 09:01, henryst mit edu wrote:
> > > Package: konqueror
> > > Version: 2.0
> > > Severity: wishlist
> > > Installed from:
> > >
> > >
> > > With the new gphoto ioslaves, it seems you have to type a URL in
> > > konqueror, like "kamera://" or "gphoto://."  Do you think it may be
> > > necessary to add some GUI interface for accessing things like this
> > > so that people don't have to remember them?  Perhaps if it became
> > > part of the Tree View, like "Home Directory" & "Network"?
> >
> > Yes, kamera should probably install an entry in the directory tree.
>
> I thought there is a new "device" view in Konqueror for this -- that would be a
> nice place to put it IMHO.
>
> Anyway, the proper bug report for both "kamera://" and "gphoto://" is that they
> violate the URL RFC (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt), don't they?  You
> can't just create a new scheme, just like you can't just create a new mimetype
> -- imagine if everyone just starts creating their own schemes.  They wouldn't
> be very "Uniform" then, would they?  It seems a list of current schemes is at
> http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/url-schemes.
>
> I'm not sure how you deal with proposed schemes, but all the "accepted" schemes
> (just like the accepted mimetypes) have an RFC. Perhaps like with mimetypes you
> preface the scheme with "x-", so we have "x-kamera://"?
>
> "Gphoto" is not a great choice here b/c schemes should be implementation
> independent, I don't see an RFC ever getting created under that name.  But if
> there is some more "generic" camera-access scheme that would be great.  (In
> fact "camera" should probably be a scheme, as there are already schemes for
> "tel" -> telephone, "fax" and "modem").  Maybe the gphoto people are interested
> in an RFC for some standard way to access camera devices?

An RFC for digital photography device access schemes could be
based on or inspired by:

- RFC 2396 on Uniform Resource Identifiers (already mentioned)
  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

- W3C's index on URI addressing schemes
  http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes/

- URI monikers in a CORBA-based system.
  http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/monikers.html

- Design rule for Camera File System by JEIDA
  http://www.pima.net/standards/it10/PIMA15740/dcf.htm

- Describing and retrieving photos using RDF and HTTP (W3C draft)
  http://www.w3.org/TR/photo-rdf/

- Picture Transfer Protocol - PIMA 15740 1.0 (ISO draft by WG42).
  http://www.pima.net/ptp/


Standards in the non-free software world seem to be a Windows Image
Acquisition API by Microsoft, the old TWAIN standard, Digita's SDK
and vendors SDKs that require non-free platforms and compilers.


-- Ole

(PS: How do they implement this access scheme in MacOS and LoseME?)