[Gllug] HTTP CONNECT

[Vidar Hokstad]

On Fri, 2002-10-11 at 10:57, Wulf Forrester-Barker wrote:
> Simon Wilcox wrote:
> 
> > Ironically we have users that insist that there must be a www.
> infront 
> > of the URL for our on-line services and can't get their heads around
> 
> > the fact that there isn't. We've had some pretty irate people telling
> 
> > us that www.xxx.yyy.com doesn't work and they just can't manage to
> type 
> > xxx.yyy.com!!!
> 
> It's a shame really that URLs use the same character to delimit the
> server from the domain as is used to delimit the different portions of
> the domain. I'm sure joe-average would find it easier to understand the
> concept of server - domain - location if URLs looked something like:
> 
> http://www@web-den.org.uk/home/
> 
> (or using some other character... anything that won't turn up in a
> domain name) rather than
> 
> http://www.web-den.org.uk/home/
> 
> Was any consideration given to that when the format of URLs was being
> defined? (quote me a relevant RFC and I'll RTFM ;-)


As someone else pointed out www.web-den.org.uk is just as much a valid
domain as web-den.org.uk is. If they used your scheme, what would you
do if web-den.org.uk also resolved to an IP address and provided web
service? Would the address be http://@web-den.org.uk/ or
http://web-den@org.uk ? In either case I don't think it would be any
less confusing.

Add to that that "@" is already taken, for separating username/password
from the hostname. As an example, http://foo:bar@www.web-den.org.uk/
is a perfectly legal URL, and will make your web browser submit foo
as the username and bar as the password for HTTP authentication
(typically what you'll find in your .htpasswd files). The password
is optional, so you can also do http://foo@www.web-den.org.uk/.

This is in widespread use, in particular for FTP, and of course
for "mailto:"

Vidar

vidar at hokstad.name



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