Re: [GnomeMeeting-devel-list] [Fwd: Re: URL bugs?]

[Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>]

Le ven 06/06/2003 à 21:13, Christian Rose a écrit :

> This seems to be the fundamental cause for all the problems mentioned in
> this thread. While URL:s are never "intuitive" as a concept and it is
> wrong to speak of "intuitiveness" that way, the concepts of an URL
> scheme can indeed get familiar to technical people after much usage.
> 

Indeed. All people are using URLs at least for HTTP and for e-mail.

> So since the RFC proposes an URL scheme that breaks the expectations for
> most people who have ever gotten accustomed to an URL scheme at all,
> namely the one used on the rest of the net, the proposal seems to be
> severely flawed in this area. It seems the writers of this RFC paid much
> time to invent a precise syntax from scratch, but missed the parts with
> aiding the use of existing URL parsers and important compatibility with
> the most commonly used URL scheme.

I agree. The worse in this is that their URL scheme is incompatible with
SIP. SIP being intuitive and similar to HTTP. H323 being
counter-intuitive, but both URLs are of the form "alias hostname" so I
don't see why they made the H.323 URL incompatible with the SIP URL.

> However, URL:s often do have some advantages such as easy access and
> manipulation, and also display easily spottable and important
> information for those who have learned the syntax. So in the case of web
> browsers and applications like GM, they typically do make some kind of
> sense to have (and IIRC the use of a location field in GM has been
> debated before, no need to start that debate again).
> 

Indeed. Instead of comparing H.323 and SIP URLs to the HTTP URLs, we
should compare them to mail addresses : alias hostname except that in
the case of SIP and H.323 the hostname or the alias part (following if
you are registered to a SIP proxy/H.323 gatekeeper) are optional.

> 1. User enters "foo:1740"
> 2. GM interprets this as an attempt for a H323 connection (if h323 is
> the default protocol), and rewrites the URL in the field to
> "h323://foo:1740", and tries to connect with H323.
> 3. If that attempt fails, ask the user if he wants to try SIP instead
> (if SIP is the second protocol), or cancel the connection attempt. If
> yes, rewrite to "sip://foo:1740" and try connecting using SIP.
> 
> This is all very sketchy and I don't know if it makes sense, I have
> basically no knowledge of the protocols involved, but I'm just trying to
> show that using a consistent, protocol independant and potentially
> already familiar URL scheme has its advantages.
> 

Actually SIP is not (yet) supported but I have great hopes to add
support for it in August and who knows perhaps work for a Linux company
who would accept to pay me to do it (one can dream ;) ).

The current decision that was taken for GM is to do some "clever"
guessing on the URLs. If the URL that the user entered breaks the RFC,
we try to guess if we can still call the destination or not. But we do
no rewrite of the URL field.

> 
> Christian
> 
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-- 
Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>