Andreas Delmelle wrote:
Hi Simon and Andreas,
On 07 May 2009, at 21:15, Simon Pepping wrote:
On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 03:08:30PM -0000, cbowdi...@apache.org wrote:
Author: cbowditch
Date: Thu May 7 15:08:30 2009
New Revision: 772672
URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=772672&view=rev
Log:
bug fix: allow back slashes for file URLs as they are commonly used
in Windows
I would not like to call file:///C:\mydirectory\myfile a correct
URL. URLs are one format where Windows and Unix users use the same
forward slashes. URL is a standard for all OSes alike.
I very much agree with that assessment. Browsing through the related
RFCs, one notices that the forward slash is a 'reserved' character,
while a backslash is considered 'unwise'. The reason is that "gateways
and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify such
characters, or they are
used as delimiters".
Following RFC 2396, the URL 'file:///c:\mydirectory\myfile' is not
equivalent to 'file:///c:/mydirectory/myfile' from the point of view of
URI syntax.
Whilst you are both technically correct, I made the change because
backslashes in file URLs used to work until revision 752153 when
Jeremias inadvertantly removed support for this. Whilst this may be
against the URL spec this is a feature that improves usability of the
product. A lot of users out there aren't aware of the details of RFC
2396 and are used to being able to use backslashes in file URLs
(especially on Windows systems). So if we remove support for this we may
get a few more questions on fop-user.
I personally prefer flexibility over rigid conformance to a
specification and stand by my change. There are a few parts of the
XSL-FO specification that I disagree with as well as I think they make
it harder for the user to achieve what they need. Look at indent
inheritance; that often confuses users, and makes it harder for users to
achieve the affect they seek. So blindly following a spec isn't always
the right thing to do IMO.
Therefore, it is wrong to expect them to yield the same behavior. One
could argue that we then also need to allow a colon as separator for
the hierarchical parts, to satisfy legacy Mac OS users... :-)
Thanks,
Chris
Regards
Andreas
