Re: File dialogs: Network access

[Ken Fox <kfox vulpes com>]

Dylan Griffiths wrote:
> I can get past the illusion in a second.

That's a feature to me. Higher-level abstractions are nice, but the
ability to drop beneath them is nice too. I write C code, but occasionally
ask gcc to generate assembler. I use a web browser, but still telnet
to port 80.

> I can see the Gnome-VFS being good because you could add meta-data features
> fairly easily, but I'd prefer to see it lower in the system (perhaps we
> should all use ext4 with new BeFS meta-data features, or OS/2 Extended
> Attributes? :)).

This is a good argument to put URL features into the dialog -- it allows
us to move the implementation around. On systems where FTP is implemented
as a file system the dialog can easily translate ftp://host/ URLs into
the file system names. On other systems, the dialog may have to fork an
actual ftp client.

The file system is just a name space. URLs form a name space too. Since
URLs are a super set of the file system name space, I don't see what the
issue is.

- Ken