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List:       mozilla-ui
Subject:    Re: File System Browsing with Mozilla
From:       rpk () world ! std ! com (Robert P !  Krajewski)
Date:       1998-05-23 5:05:38
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In article <199805221629.JAA08476@goodnet.com>, ecloud@goodnet.com (Shawn
Rutledge) wrote:

> > [rpk]But these days I think
> > that NFS and perhaps, more realistically,  CIFS/SMB are the way to go.
> 
> WebNFS, definitely.  [...] basically WebNFS is NFS without al
> the complex authentication - seems
> NFS uses multiple ports and thus firewalls usually prevent regular NFS
> from working.

Good. I'd be curious to see if it they've fixed various shortcomings in
NFS as I know it, but most of them (like file locking) aren't really
issues for file browsing anyway.

> Sun servers have had WebNFS servers for a while; I'm not sure
> who else does (I imagine Linux either does or will very soon).  But it seems 
> like a pretty decent standard, and it beats adopting some MS junk just 
> because it's there.

I respectfully disagree; CIFS implementations are installed now in a lot
of places were FTP and NFS (let alone WebNFS) aren't found. And, as I
pointed out before, there is already open source code for CIFS clients out
there that can be adapted. (If it exists for WebNFS as well, cool. The
more the merrier.) I agree that CIFS is crufty in places, but it's a real
standard now (the Open Group is managing it). And most end-users just
don't care about these issues -- they just want access.

But I will make two arguments against using non-FTP protocols, just to
illustrate some of the other issues that should be addressed if file
browsing were to get pumped up in some way. (Sorry, I don't have enough
time to contribute to this effort.)

* Why should Mozilla contain a feature that's likely to be implemented at
a system level on the client OS ? (At least for certain OSes.) Isn't that
a waste of effort ? Some justifications: (1) Browsing the entire Internet
might be more convenient with Mozilla. Native OS facilities for browsing
usually work better at the intranet/workgroup level. (2) Mozilla can hand
off to the OS once the starts doing anything more than simple
browsing/uploading/copying operations by mapping a URI back into an OS
pathname where appropriate, especially when doing things like launching
viewer applications. (3) For OSes that don't support a particular
protocol, you are doing a lot of users a big favor. MacOS and Windows
users get WebNFS, a lot of Unix users get CIFS support, and so on.

* What about all these protocols ? Users want features and don't want to
remember URL schemes for FTP, WebNFS, or CIFS. There are a couple of ways
around this. The first is to enhance Mozilla's interpretation of the file:
scheme to try various protocols. But that has a problem: trying and
failing is kind of slow for the first resolution of the URL. However,
there is a proposed service-finder protocol that might speed things up.
Unfortunately, I haven't looked at it in detail, but if it's anything like
the old Symbolics service-finding stuff based on their namespace system,
that might be the right thing to use...

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