Re: LYNX-DEV /foo/.. ?

[Foteos Macrides]

Wayne Buttles <address@hidden> wrote:
>I _am_ trying to figure it out to understand whether it is needed in a
>variant of lynx for dos.  I would never use it in an external url.  I
>grepped for /foo/ and saw where it was applied, but couldn't find where it
>was later used.

        It's added for URLs that have no path for Unix or Unix-like
servers in the ftp gateway (HTFTP.c), and in the for-Unix
file://localhost/ directory listing code (HTFile.c), so that the
resolution of "/foo/.." as '/' in the HTBTree() sorter will get the
URL treated as a listing for the root, and thereafter offer "Up to /"
links for directories directly under the root.  The case A: code in
HTML_start_element() of HTML.c then strips out the "/foo/.." when
rendering.

        Note that you have to play similar games if you are using
the CERN server as an ftp_proxy.  It respects RFC 1738 so that
if you use ftp for your personal Unix account, e.g.,

        ftp://me:address@hidden/
        
you'll get a listing of your own login directory, not the server's
root as Lynx would give you on Unix (unless you add '~' as the path).
Using just an escaped slash won't work with the libwww code, and
thus with the CERN proxy, i.e.,

        ftp://me:address@hidden/%2F

will still give you a listing of your login directory.  So you have
to give it something after the %2F plus a /.. to get you back up to
the root.

    For CERN proxy server:
        ftp://me:address@hidden/%2Fusr/..
                               ^^^^^^^^^
    For Lynx (without a CERN proxy server):
        ftp://me:address@hidden/

Try those if you have access to a CERN proxy for ftp.

        For DOS, you should do it "right", as I did for VMS, and
use an overt URL_symbolic_path <-> local_file_system translation
function.  The similarity between URL symbolic path structure and
the Unix file system resulted in Lynx being developed without such
a coherent translation function for file://localhost/path URLs, and
a kludge to make that and ftp work equivalently, all before I got
involved with Lynx.  Sigh...

                                Fote

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