Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 10:48 -0400, Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Fri, September 22, 2006 10:18 am, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > So, IRIs are better than URIs, but not perfect. They might still be our
> > best choice though.
> 
> I agree. AFAIU, IRIs will be used mostly for the case when people
> want to type the filename directly. Few things to keep in mind:
>   -- a small percentage of users will use this. While typing the
>      file directly is often requested (and I fall in that camp),
>      it is mostly relevant for local file paths.
>   -- even if we cover only 90% of filenames with IRIs, it's still
>      OK, since the user can always browse to the file in those
>      exceptional cases.
> 
> Put the two togeter, and you have only a _tiny_ fraction of cases
> where we might have problems. For this reason I maintain that we
> should stick to well known concepts:
>   -- standard naming schemes: IRIs are great, since they behave
>      as normal people would expect URI to behave (except maybe
>      for the restricted set of chars).
>   -- in most (all?) cases where we would be using IRIs, there
>      is no ambiguity in allowing even the unallowed IRIs
>      chars (like space, etc.) and simply escape them automatically.
>      This will make them even more usable to the regular folk.

Yeah, I agree.

> On the IRI's restricted char set, I would like to point out that
> they exist to make IRIs (easily) usable by programs. When _users_
> interact with IRIs though (like in the location bar), there is no
> ambiguity whatsoever if we lift all such restrictions. For this
> reason, users get upset (and rightly so) if they type stuff unescaped
> and it doesn't work for reasons that they don't really care about
> (or can't even imagine for that matter).

I don't think thats the primary reason for them. The primary reason for
not allowing e.g. space in an IRI is that the details of such whitespace
could be lost if you transfer the IRI over e.g. printed line-wrappend
media.

> Do I understand correctly that IRIs will be used (by and large) just
> in Nautilus location bar and the Open File Dialog location bar?

Yeah. Thats the only place I can think of for it.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a fast talking amnesiac romance novelist with a secret. She's an 
enchanted tomboy single mother with an MBA from Harvard. They fight crime!