Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
	It's really just programmer laziness that makes us see URL's as a mirror of 
	file systems, anyway... 

Not true.  file: URI's *are* a mirror of file systems,
and ftp: URI's don't strictly speaking *have* to be (an FTP server is at
liberty to interpret "directory" names and "file" names as it wishes,
even to use a noise diode to consult the spirit of its dead grandfather)
but in practice almost always *is*.

mailto: and news: URI's don't look like file system references,
but http: ones do, and the model of file: and ftp: is hard to ignore.

The amount of documentation you have to read to really understand what
goes on in a web server is daunting, and I would regard the direct
mapping from URIs to file names that servers make so very easy to set up
as "beginners showing a proper humility and dread".

It's certain evidence that a company claiming to be web experts aren't,
as is syntactically illegal HTML, but Joe T. Web-Admin (T for Trainee)
can be forgiven a lot.

Mind you, if you open file:$cwd/foo with Amaya (the W3C's own browser),
it will completely fail to notice that foo's content is HTML.  You'd
think the "<!DOCTYPE" line was a pretty good clue, but now, and there
is no way to force it to open a file as HTML.

	I'd rather not know how you've organized your web server's file
	system.  Just give me a clean, unchanging URI space that I can
	bookmark.  Free of implementation details (.html/.gif/.jpg extensions,
	server names, .cgi/.jsp, etc.).
	
I don't care how the file system is organised, but I ***do*** appreciate
a clue about what I'll see if I follow a link.  A link to a .htm file is
one thing and a link to a .pdf file is another, and I'd like to know the
difference *before* I go there.  This is why I'd rather .csi, .asp, .jsp
things were labelled according to what kind of document I'll end up with.

(Yes, I am familiar with the HTML standards, and know that you can put
the information in the anchor.  Thing is, what the web browser knows
about the link, it doesn't tell, except for the text of the URI.)