# Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Free AFS software licenses

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Tue, 15 Nov 1994 20:21:18 PST

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    To: Mirjana_Spasojevic@transarc.com

    In-Reply-To: Mirjana_Spasojevic@transarc.com's message of Tue, 15 Nov 1994 19:03:39 -0800 <YijadAOSMV1aINsU0o@transarc.com>

    Subject: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Free AFS software licenses

    From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

    Message-Id: <94Nov15.202123pst.2760@golden.parc.xerox.com>

    Date: 	Tue, 15 Nov 1994 20:21:18 PST

While the announcement was made on www-announce, I thought it was
more appropriate to reply more locally, since this is primarily a
"url" issue. These comments are in response to:

ftp://grand.central.org/afs/tr/public/www/Department/ARPA/Mosaic94/paper.html

The use of the "file:" mechanism to mean *either* local file access
*or* anonymous FTP access has been deprecated; it was an interesting
'pun' that caused serious problems, primarily because the exported FTP
file space for anonymous FTP access rarely resembled the local file
space for local file system.

Your proposal for using afs for resolution of afs URLs continue to
overload those methods in ways that are probably incompatible with
other existing uses.

It would make more sense, I think, for afs access to be promoted
through a separate URL scheme, afs, rather than trying to continue to
overload 'file:' and 'ftp:'. Those browsers/sites that didn't support
direct afs access could use a proxy gateway for afs translation.

The "afs:" URL scheme got dropped from the (soon to be) draft standard
for URLs, not for any principled technical reason, but rather that we
lacked a specification for the interpretation of the scheme.

I am enthusiastic about the intent of your proposal, in that AFS does
indeed provide a mechanism for replication and caching that will be of
great use on the Internet. I hope you will consider modifying it, and
your sample source code release, however, to be more compatible with
current directions in URL standardization.

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