On 11/16/2012 4:58 PM, James Cloos wrote:
>>>>>> "DC" == Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:
> 
> DC> In fact, I really don't see why file:// URLs should go through
> DC> url-handlers.el at all. A file URL should be a simple pass-through
> DC> to the normal file handler machinery, yes?
> 
> Only file:/// or file://localhost/ should point to the local
> filesystem.  file://example.org/foo.bar is a valid uri to some
> resource on example.org using some (unspecified) access method.

It's elegant in theory to make URIs network-transparent, but in practice,
"file:" always refers to a local file. Nobody constructs a file URI intending to
refer to a remote resource not accessible through ordinary filesystem mounts,
and plenty of people accidentally construct file URIs with enough leading
slashes to convince Emacs that a resource is remote. Until I fixed it, our
drag-and-drop code did just that.

If anyone actually uses remote file URIs, please tell me. Otherwise, I intend to
make "file:" and "file://" strictly equivalent and always local.