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

[Alan Bateman]

On 16/10/2012 13:24, Tom Hawtin wrote:
> 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).
Yes, that's right, there is still a lot of code that uses URL instead of 
URI. In any case, the proposal here is just to change the specification 
to remove "ftp" from the list of protocol handlers that are required to 
be present. The ftp protocol handler will of course still be there so 
existing code will still work.

-Alan