Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

Hi list

On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 11:26 -0400, Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Thu, September 21, 2006 10:47 am, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > One solution would be to use some other prefix than / for
> > non-local files, and to use some form of escaping only for non-utf8
> > chars and non-printables. This works since we only handle absolute
> > pathnames, so anything not starting with / is out of band.
> 
> I think this is a sippery slope -- a new form of URI which is
> the same but a bit different will be very confusing. I took the
> general population 10 years to grok a tiny bit of the URI concept,
> and most people still don't get it.  The techinical points about
> escaping and so on are so foreign to most folks that they will
> be utterly confused (and very annoyed) that they can't enter
> an unescaped URI.
> 
> I agree that the fully escaped URI is insane for an interface
> with the user. That's clearly just an internal notation. Howerver,
> for folks that understand URI enough to type them directly in
> text (which is very seldom even for people that do understand
> them simply because they are usually long enough that typos are
> very likely), we can just simply accept improper URIs unescaped
> and escape them internally ourselves. Whatever we do, this is not
> really a use case that's common, no need to optimize for it.

IRI's can be used for this. IRIs are directly mapped to URIs by
escaping.

> 
> Complicated URIs like FTP need graphical support to be usable
> by mortals (we have server, port, login, password, encoding,
> directory, filename). How about we have the backend register
> some sort of edit dialog that can present all this information
> graphically rather than (just) a textual encoding?
> 
-- 
Alex Jones <alex weej com>