164153 - "network.protocol-handler.external.<scheme>" needs to support syntax of scheme

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[benc]

From Bug 163767:

------- Additional Comment #16 From Benjamin Chuang  2002-08-22 11:23 -------

Is your patch the first implementation of this, or modifying the existing prefs
that are supported? 

I'm working on URL scheme test cases right now, so I'm hoping you are going to
say that the scheme handling is caps insensitive, as well as handling other
aspects of scheme formating:

(from RFC 2396:)

     scheme        = alpha *( alpha | digit | "+" | "-" | "." 

Does anyone know how well the punctuation will work in a pref?

I'm concerned that the "." that is valid in schemes will cause problems. I don't
know about "+" nor "-".

Comment 1

[benc]

Adding URL and prefs experts to discuss this problem.

Comment 2

[Andreas Otte]

There are several functions in nsURLHelper.cpp that handle the scheme syntax,
for example net_IsValidScheme(const char *scheme, PRUint32 schemeLen) and of
course it is case insensitive. But I fail to see what this has to do with these
prefs ...

Comment 3

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

The period will place the preference into a different "branch" of the preference
tree. As there is only one preference tree, this shouldn't be an issue...
however, it could become a problem if the way preferences are stored internally
changes...

Also, I don't know if it matters but, preferencs are case sensitive. Thus:
network.protocol-handler.external.myscheme
and
network.protocol-handler.external.MyScheme

are considered two unique preference entries.

Comment 4

[benc]

If a pref were created to handle the schemes: "ben.dot" and "ben", which is
legal, the pref would be:

network.protocol-handler.external.ben.dot
network.protocol-handler.external.ben

I think we should have some convention for escaping the "." in the mapping of
the scheme string to the prefs tree.

As for the caps issue, I assume that we want whatever code is reading the prefs
tree for a scheme match to convert to lowercase, and require that people store
all their scheme prefs in lower case as well.

Comment 5

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

ben says he is working on this.

Comment 6

[benc]

I'm not sure where this should go now. Do we send it to prefs people for a solution?

Comment 7

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

prefs is currently without an owner (ben's working on other projects, afaik), so
i wouldn't send it there for the time being.