On Sun, 2009-11-01 at 23:27 +0000, Chris Young wrote:
> On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:47:30 +0000, John-Mark Bell wrote:
> 
> > Therefore, all file URIs in NetSurf are of the form:
> > 
> > file:///<path>
> > 
> > This is correct, per spec.
> 
> The problem is, as NetSurf is assuming the localhost part, when it
> actually encounters localhost as part of the path, it handles it
> incorrectly, and you end up with file:///localhost/.

If it's part of the path, there should be no problem.

> This wouldn't normally be a problem, but as the old Amiga browsers all
> used file://localhost/ there are quite a number of scripts and
> documentation launchers which don't work with NetSurf without this
> change.

Right, so they're actually specifying the host part. This needs some
thought. Please stick a bug on the tracker.

> The core should probably be stripping out the hostname part rather
> than adding additional slashes in front of it.  

It's not quite that simple. There needs to be a reliable way of knowing
that file://localhost/<path> really is requesting <path> on the local
host, rather than "localhost" being the top-level component of the path.

Most likely, the correct solution is some kind of DNS lookup (as you'd
expect file://<hostname>/<path> to also work, where <hostname> is
whatever the current host's name is).


J.


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