Re: Bug in <BASE ..> or in relative URL's? RFC for CGI-specification

Darren New (dnew@sgf.fv.com)
Thu, 25 Aug 1994 13:13:06 +0100


> Well, I think the base of MS-Windows IS MSDOS and the MSDOS-file system
> recognizes the '.' as your actual (current working) directory. So sorry,
> but I don't understand what the problem is.

The problem is that there is no one current working directory. There's a
current working directory for A:, one for B:, one for C:, and so on.

Also, these "current directories" change as the user manipulates other
programs. There isn't one "current directory" per process. There's just
one per disk.

> > So... which current directory should file://localhost/./ reference there?
> Just where you started, see above.

Ah. Then you mean that file://localhost/./ should refer to the directory
that the HTML client (Mosaic in your example) came from.

Let's say my current directories are A:\one and C:\two and Mosaic is in
C:\bin and C:\bin is in my path. My current drive is A: when I invoke
Mosaic with file://localhost/./ What should it look for?

That is the problem I'm referring to.

> > Remember, HTTP is not just UNIX. -- Darren
> ^ Of course, but I wrote too that this all is only related to
> "file://"-(pseudo)-protocol, which has nothing to do with HTTP.

Well, HTTP runs on more than UNIX, as does Mosaic and other HTML-based
clients, is what I meant. file://... does indeed have something to do
with HTTP, since you want your server returning that over HTTP to a
client, yes? Wasn't that your whole point?

Let's take this offline if we continue. It's getting kind of silly, and I
think the point is made.