xml-dev - Re: file: URIs and MS Windows

[richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)]

Tom Passin wrote:

>The RFC (RFC 1738) defines them quite clearly, except for possibly the use
>of the colon after a drive letter ("c:").

Yes, the drive letter is the non-obvious point.

(Though to be pedantic, what RFC1738 says is that the path part of the
URL is a hierarchical directory path, not that it necessarily
corresponds directly to the hierarchy in the filesystem.  I suppose
you *could* use backslashes (perhaps escaped) and get a very flat and
useless hierarchy.)

>So according to the RFC, the following are legal:
>
>file://localhost/c:/xml/xsl.bat
>file:///c:/xml/xsl.bat

I had always supposed (until I looked at the RFC) that things like

  file:/foo/bar

were legal, since that's what Netscape gives me on Unix when I open a
file.  I can't find any justification for it; is there a generic URI
rule anywhere that says a URI with no //host part is equivalent to the
same with an empty string as the host?

Thanks,
  -- Richard
-- 
Spam filter: to mail me from a .com/.net site, put my surname in the headers.

"The Internet is really just a series of bottlenecks joined by high
speed networks." - Sam Wilson

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