On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 03:37:35PM -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 03:31:56PM -0400, John Porter wrote:
> > Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> > > So URLs are not
> > > literals, they have structure, and only thinking of them as filenames
> > > may be too simplistic.
> >
> > Yeah. But Rebol manages to deal with them.
>
> I doubt it. telephone:? fax:? lpp:? callto:? uuid:?
>
> If Rebol can handle all of those URL schemes, why bother with Perl
> in the first place?
>
> > I don't know if this is something we want to follow Rebol's
> > lead on, but it's something to look at.
>
> Sounds like if there's a 'use url;' clause in use, then the standard
> three (mailto:, http:, ftp:) might be available, whereas other
> URL schemes would need different declarations (use url::dns;).
I'm not saying that having URLs wouldn't be nice, it's just that
thinking of them as entity names and just practicing simple I/O
(print, getline) on them is overstretching the idea. The objects
behind the URLs might be messy, errr, complex. Let's say you open
ftp://foo.bar/. Fine. Now what? How do you do a DIR? How do you do
a GET? A PUT? A CWD? A MKDIR? Then http:// How's GET different
from POST? How do you change the headers? This is starting to sound
like libnet and LWP? Good. It should. There's only so much magic
you can sweep under the carpet before it starts flying off at
dangerous directions.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
