I've trimmed a couple of people I _know_ are on the xemacs-beta list. No point in duplications. Kai> Why do we have to use URL syntax if it is inconvenient? Kai> Wouldn't "/ftp:user＠host:/path/to/file" work, too? Specifically, it doesn't generalize very well to relative URLs with non-default port numbers. Various user interfaces will continue to be supported for backward compatibility and convenience (although I think that the URL syntax is sufficiently clumsy but common that somebody will soon write an optimized completer or other convenient interface for it; for all I know it might be the EFS syntax). I don't think anybody thinks file://localhost/users/t/turnbull/the-file-I-want is a remotely acceptable substitute for "~/the-file-I-want". However, as an internal interface (what Nelson is advocating), it has the great advantage of being uniform. Other tools support it, users are becoming familiar with it. As the lowest-common-denominator for-sure-this-will-work syntax, I think those are very important. Four things that haven't been mentioned yet (I think, I expired the beginning of the thread): o A user can check if the Not-Invented-Here protocol is supported by his Emacs simply by typing in nihp://host/file What's the extended EFS representation of that URL? o Implementers of new protocols with external programs that support URLs just (cons '("nihp" . "nihp-get") url-external-program-alist)' Of course it won't be _that_ easy, but it will help. o Nowadays lots of my fetches are "point-and-click-on-URL" in a buffer somewhere. No munge-to-fit-Emacs-internal-representation is necessary to implement that in a new application, nor any separate quickly outdated URL-parsing library. o When the URL syntax gets amended, we know how to revise the Emacs internal representation. ("It won't," you say?) -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."

That syntax does not conflict with anything else in Emacs. As far as I can see, using this would not cause any problem.