On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 09:40, Steve Loughran wrote: > >My point is why should the protocol matter? Why *shouldn't* the attribute > > "file" be overloaded?
because people don't think of files and urls as being synonymous? ;) > 1. it aint a file, it is a URL. I know that you can argue that it is a > remote file, but that assumes that the url endpoint is 'legacy' static > content, not some dynamically created or retrieved thing. or that URL actually has an endopoint. How would you copy a "mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]" url ? ;) While I do like the concept of urls as general resource directory I think it needs to be done at a virtual filesystem level. Then we could query the "file" to see whether it supports operation X (where X may be read, write, getType, getName, canRead etc)/ > 2. The more information we provide in the XML syntax, the less > interpretation which needs to be included in the runtime, which gives more > flexibility in the future. Example: with a URL= syntax you could have an > XSLT task which treated file= assignments differently from url= > assignments. > > My friend Gabe, serious XML hacker, once took me aside and listed all the > places where ant was naughty and used hid structure inside an XML literal > instead of on the outside, which roughly comes down to wherever we used a > list and wherever an attribute was overloaded: > <target depends="task1,task2" > > <exec os="windows 2000, unix" > (actually this is worse, as we just > substring match, so "windows" would still get a hit> > includes="...", excludes="..." yep ;( > Now, some things have happenened, and they are frozen in the ant 1.x > syntax. But we dont need to make things continually worse, do we? hope not. Especially not with the depends attribute ;) > 3. Remember that email about how we should have consistent property names, > srcFile and srcDir, destFile and destDir. Using srcURL and destURL would be > consistent. Yes, I know that <copy> isnt consistent with this scheme, but > that is a historical feature. We could make it consistent... we should really go through and make a list of all the ones already in existence and then try to draw something from that. I seem to recall that copy actually moved away from that syntax for some reason. -- Cheers, Pete --------------------------------------------------- "If you don't know where you want to go, we'll make sure you get taken." Microsoft ad slogan, translated into Japanese. --------------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
