Thus spake Drake Wilson (drake@xxxxxxxxxxxx): > Quoth Mike Perry <mikeperry@xxxxxxxxxx>, on 2010-10-01 18:51:07 -0700: > > Intuition also tells me that tor:// and tors:// urls will be easier to > > use, understand, and remember by the general public.. Can you give > > some examples/reasons why just using these schemes actually prevents > > us from doing this scheme layering idea for other protocols in the > > future (when it is supported)? In otherwords, why can't we just do both? > > It doesn't inherently do that, but it leaves a very bad taste in my > mouth. If the HTTP form is that much shorter, now it's implicitly the > first-class one: it gets the premium name that people will actually > use, and every other protocol is stuck with the leftovers. This is > the same layer violation, just enforced fuzzily by hordes of humans > acting on their baseline psychology instead of by software, so I still > consider it pollution of the URI space: it's supposed to be Universal > Resource Identifiers, not A Pup Called HTTP. Doesn't your suspicion that baseline psychology will lead users to use tor:// over torhttp:// given the opportunity to use either tell you anything about which interface is more user friendly? > The fuzzy URI-matching you mentioned is something I hadn't considered, > and is an unfortunate practical constraint in this case. That would > lead me to consider, say, prefixing schemas with "or" instead, to keep > the whole thing alphabetic. orhttp:, orhttps:, orirc:, ... ? Heh, it turns out this has the same problem, at least with Pidgin. torhttp://link.com still creates an http hyperlink that when clicked on directly would be loaded outside of Tor. httptor://link.com does not create a hyperlink, though.. Nor does http+tor://link.com. Perhaps the way we could specify this is that officially, the scheme format is [scheme]+tor://site.com where if scheme is omitted, it defaults to http. But then that still leaves tors as the bastard child short-hand for https+tor://site.com. But I'm fine with bastard children. > (I can say on a personal level that I am hardly unbiased, and that I > will refuse to accept or produce tor: URIs if non-HTTP protocols get > the short/long end of the stick/schema, not that that particularly > matters.) Call me an unrepentant utilitarian, but 2 computer scientists refusing to use a feature for a reason that 90% of our userbase won't even understand doesn't strike me as a compelling reason to do anything. However, patches from said 2 protesters might change my mind ;) -- Mike Perry Mad Computer Scientist fscked.org evil labs
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