Richard writes:

> Wirt Atmar wrote:
>  >...>
>  >      /resourceserver {http://aics-research.com/qcterm_blobs}
>  >      /resources {alfredo.wav apollo13.mid hplogo.bmp ... }
>  >
>  > The question I would genuinely appreciate any feedback on is this: Is
> there
>  > any reason to also maintain FTP in addition to HTTP? Its syntax could be
>  > easily accomodated in this manner:
>  >
>  >      /resourceserver {ftp://aics-research.com/FTPGUEST/PUB/qcterm_blobs}
>  >
>
>  One poing on "standards", an FTP URL should be of the form:
>  [log in to unmask]:ftpport/pathtofile" target="_blank">ftp://user:[log in to unmask]:ftpport/pathtofile
>  (see http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html )
>
>  Also, a path to a directory should end with a /, as in:
>        /resourceserver {http://aics-research.com/qcterm_blobs/}

Those may be the "standards" (actually, they're only labeled preferences),
but they're rarely used nowadays. We were planning on doing pretty much what
everyone else commonly does for an FTP address now, as you can see in the
URLs that are used on a web page, e.g.:

     http://www.ftpx.com

Scan down the URLs in the center column and you'll see that they're basically
similar to the syntax that we've adopted, which is this:

  /resourceserver {ftp://yourserver/pathto/pathto user myname password mypwd}

where user and password will be optional ("anonymous" will be the default
user and "qcterm" will be the default password). This syntax is consistent
with the other graphical objects in QCTerm. And if the path-to name doesn't
end in a "/", as Richard points out, we'll automatically stick it on before
we append the actual file name to be transferred, as is common practice
nowadays in browsers.

The same will be true for the HTTP transfers:

     /resourceserver {http://yourserver/pathto/pathto port xxxx
           proxy http://xxxxxxxxxx proxyport xxx}

where port, proxy, and proxyport are again all optional parameters and have
their common values defined as defaults.

The optional parameters can appear in any order, so long as they appear in
the sequence operator:operand. Doing this allows us to add new parameters at
any time in the future.

Wirt