Sophie user's dragged media from disk file systems, the internet (yes we would copy or leave as a URI), and internally there was cached memory based URIs.
Sophisticated Sophie book could have hundreds if not thousands of then located in memory, the file system, or on the internet. 
Every reference was a URI, either absolute or based on the book's URI, then we could base the book in memory, on disk, or on the internet. 

We never passed or used a raw file path anywhere in the system.  The URI class had the responsibility to take a UTF8 platform raw file path and convert to a 
proper usable delimited URI.  For internet based URIs, we did find some of the browsers had different thoughts on how to interpreter a delimited UTF8 URI with accented characters, but 
we viewed that issue as bugs in their implementation. At the point where we needed a read/'write stream we used the URI to make the stream, file:, http:, memory: 

On the macintosh and on windows quicktime, they were quite happy to consume URI strings when asked to open media files (file: http:) 


On 2009-11-23, at 8:51 AM, Colin Putney wrote:

> 
> On 23-Nov-09, at 8:42 AM, John M McIntosh wrote:
> 
>>> Java folks expect to us URIs everywhere. I wonder how well that would work in Smalltalk.
>> 
>> I'll play broken record, and say yes we did this in Sophie. All resource references to file like things was via URI.
>> We also did the "made-up schema" so that we could refer to cached memory files versus  http: or file:
> 
> Ok, but that doesn't answer my question. How well did it work? What was good about it? What was bad about it? Was it a natural fit in Smalltalk, or did it take some shoehorning to make it work?
> 
> Colin
> 

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