Historical Perspective
zekel: No one had been quite as abused as the the little
file: URL. This URL was special because we had always used
files and DOS paths (and no one at the time knew about path
canonicalization attacks), everyone was quite sure what they looked
like , acted like, and even tasted like. It didn’t help
that the file: protocol remained in RFC limbo as a platform/OS
specific protocol. So the browser and the browser’s
little friends would take turns dressing a DOS path like an URL in
a pink bunny suit and undressing the URL with a pair of rusty
scissors, pretending it was the same DOS path they started
with. Only the simplest of URLs was able to withstand this
abuse, and it soon became clear that something would have to be
done, lest the little file: URLs go off on their own and be lost
forever. [via
Joshua Allen]
Free Associations : The Bizarre and Unhappy Story of 'file:' URLs
Free Associations : The Bizarre and Unhappy Story of ‘file:’ URLs (via Sam Ruby)....Excerpt from Keith's Weblog at
Sam Ruby: Historical Perspective
hmm... some change in IE here?...Excerpt from del.icio.us/tag/w3c at
And what of file: urls of the form
file:///c|/windows/My%20Documents%20100%2520/foo.txt?The linked article doesn’t seem to address those.
Posted by Bob Aman at