On 07 May 2009, at 21:15, Simon Pepping wrote:
On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 03:08:30PM -0000, cbowdi...@apache.org wrote:
Author: cbowditch
Date: Thu May 7 15:08:30 2009
New Revision: 772672
URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=772672&view=rev
Log:
bug fix: allow back slashes for file URLs as they are commonly used
in Windows
I would not like to call file:///C:\mydirectory\myfile a correct
URL. URLs are one format where Windows and Unix users use the same
forward slashes. URL is a standard for all OSes alike.
I very much agree with that assessment. Browsing through the related
RFCs, one notices that the forward slash is a 'reserved' character,
while a backslash is considered 'unwise'. The reason is that "gateways
and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify such
characters, or they are
used as delimiters".
Following RFC 2396, the URL 'file:///c:\mydirectory\myfile' is not
equivalent to 'file:///c:/mydirectory/myfile' from the point of view
of URI syntax.
Therefore, it is wrong to expect them to yield the same behavior. One
could argue that we then also need to allow a colon as separator for
the hierarchical parts, to satisfy legacy Mac OS users... :-)
Regards
Andreas