URL guarantees that the ftp protocol handler is present, worth re-considering this?

[Tom Hawtin]

On 15/10/2012 18:20, Mike Duigou wrote:
> We should also nuke gopher and netdoc (in sun.net.www.protocol package)
>
> I am not sure if mailto should continue as there are better solutions.

I think it's worth pointing out that in practice URL is not used just to 
open a connection. It's also used as a strong type to pass URL text 
around (poor choice of class, but there it is). For instance, it's used 
in deployment to pass to the browser. With the URL design, you need a 
handler for the protocol in order to construct it. So no passing a 
javascript: URL to showDocument (unless a third-party has registered a 
handler, or a handler is specified in the constructor within a 
privileged context).

Tom