Hmmmm I don't think I agree. I think a *VERSION* of the URI spec would be
the best way of giving platform independence with the benefit of being able
to handle http, ftp, files, etc in a transparent way.

If you look at the URI spec it is very simple. Really the base URI spec only
specifies a few things, a character set that is valid (with the ability to
escape reserved characters), a scheme (file, http, ftp), an authority
(usually host name), and a path.

I want to basically say (syntax is just an example):
f := ( File fromURI: 'file:///blah/foo/myfile.txt' ).
f bytes (or size).
f isReadable.
f isWriteable.
f isExecutable.
f makeWritableByAnyone.
f openReadOnly.

Where f is a File object or a Directory object. These objects talk via a
Bridge object to the OS.
Now change the initial string name to be an http address. Everything should
keep working with NO changes (well as little as possible). Same File or
Directory object is returned (or maybe a FtpFile ).

I think some people are getting stuck on a URI as they are used by the web.
There is nothing that says a URI is read only or writeable or in fact
anything other than an identifier (Uniform Resource Identifiers).

The following is taken from http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt just ignore
the fact that their examples use http, the "file" scheme is handled the same
way. The base URI would be the directory that the image starting in.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

   The following line is the regular expression for breaking-down a URI
   reference into its components.

      ^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?
       12            3  4          5       6  7        8 9

   The numbers in the second line above are only to assist readability;
   they indicate the reference points for each subexpression (i.e., each
   paired parenthesis).  We refer to the value matched for subexpression
   <n> as $<n>.  For example, matching the above expression to

      http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/#Related

   results in the following subexpression matches:

      $1 = http:
      $2 = http
      $3 = //www.ics.uci.edu
      $4 = www.ics.uci.edu
      $5 = /pub/ietf/uri/
      $6 = <undefined>
      $7 = <undefined>
      $8 = #Related
      $9 = Related

   where <undefined> indicates that the component is not present, as is
   the case for the query component in the above example.  Therefore, we
   can determine the value of the four components and fragment as

      scheme    = $2
      authority = $4
      path      = $5
      query     = $7
      fragment  = $9

   and, going in the opposite direction, we can recreate a URI reference
   from its components using the algorithm in step 7 of Section 5.2.

C. Examples of Resolving Relative URI References

   Within an object with a well-defined base URI of

      http://a/b/c/d;p?q

   the relative URI would be resolved as follows:

C.1.  Normal Examples

      g:h           =  g:h
      g             =  http://a/b/c/g
      ./g           =  http://a/b/c/g
      g/            =  http://a/b/c/g/
      /g            =  http://a/g
      //g           =  http://g
      ?y            =  http://a/b/c/?y
      g?y           =  http://a/b/c/g?y
      #s            =  (current document)#s
      g#s           =  http://a/b/c/g#s
      g?y#s         =  http://a/b/c/g?y#s
      ;x            =  http://a/b/c/;x
      g;x           =  http://a/b/c/g;x
      g;x?y#s       =  http://a/b/c/g;x?y#s
      .             =  http://a/b/c/
      ./            =  http://a/b/c/
      ..            =  http://a/b/
      ../           =  http://a/b/
      ../g          =  http://a/b/g
      ../..         =  http://a/
      ../../        =  http://a/
      ../../g       =  http://a/g


-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Colin
Putney
Sent: Friday, 23 April 2004 7:07 AM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Re: FileDirectory>>fileExists: (was: Re: [BUG]Unable to load
BFAV,various problems )


On Apr 22, 2004, at 3:57 PM, Doug Way wrote:

> Anyway my main point was that I didn't think a URL/URI implementation 
> would work for what we want to do.

Yeah, that's the key point alright.

Colin