# Re: Revised Internet-Draft: finger URL

Paul Hoffman (ietf-lists@proper.com)
Sun, 26 Feb 1995 11:59:24 -0700

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    Message-Id: <v02110104ab767dfa6b29@[165.227.40.27]>

    Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 11:59:24 -0700

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

    From: ietf-lists@proper.com (Paul Hoffman)

    Subject: Re: Revised Internet-Draft: finger URL

>Sorry for weighing in late on this, but my personal opinion after some
>consideration is that
>
> finger://host1.bigstate.edu/someuser
>
>is preferable to finger:someuser@host1.bigstate.edu
>
>and that
> finger://host2.bigstate.edu/someuser@host1.bigstate.edu
>
>is preferable to finger someuser@host1.bigstate.edu@host2.bigstate.edu
>
>i.e., that what appears after the "//" is the FQDN of the host to
>connect to, and that what appears after the subsequent "/" is whatever
>gets sent to the finger port at that site.

This is OK with me, but there are two scenarios that are covered in the
current I-D that do not work well with finger://host/request.

- How to allow
finger:user@usershost@host1@host2
This is allowed under the RFC 1288, but I don't see a way to do that in
your format. On the other hand, I think this case is so rare that you would
need to do this as a URL that we can ignore it.

- How to allow "/W". Again, I think this is very rarely used and would be
willing to toss it out.

I made the choice of "finger:request" based on an early request for both of
these features since they are allowed in RFC 1288. However, there seems to
be a groundswell towards the standard URL syntax, which also makes good
sense. I just want to be sure that we agree to eliminate these two
rarely-used features before switching to this syntax.

Also, I would like to see discussion about allowing host:port in this
syntax. Should it be allowed, even though RFC 1288 says only serve on port
79? Are the security issues raised by forcing Internet users to know about
special ports worth the flexibility of allowing this?

--Paul Hoffman
--Proper Publishing

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