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[Frank Bax]

At 11:05 PM 2/4/05, Don Parris wrote:

>On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 22:08:17 -0500
>Frank Bax <fbax at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> > Are there any other file systems besides MS that either use drive letters
> > or do not have a single  'root' directory (MS has a root dir for each
> > drive letter)?  I ask because I thought I found a bug in FireFox:
> >          http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=213537
> > But when I searched Bugzilla, I found this one that seems the same:
> >          <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257321>https://bug
> >          zilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257321
> > Now I'm wondering if the FireFox people have taken an anti-microsoft
> > stand, but are pretending not to?
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
>
>I have WinXP at work, and use Firefox there.  I've never had any problems yet.


This problem is with local files, not website access.

Create an html file (anywhere on your disk) that contains these lines:
         <a href="/index.html">TEST LINK</a>
         <img src='/Sample.gif' width='20' height='20' border='1' />
You can change the links to path of any html/graphics files on the same 
drive as this test file.  Open this test file in IE and the image will 
appear and the link will work.  In Firefox the image does not appear and 
the link does not work.

Here's a real life example.  Suppose you have a website with static 
content.  You want to "show" this website to someone that has no internet 
access[*].  Why not simply copy the entire website to a cdrom and use 
that.  This approach will work with IE, but not Firefox; and the folks at 
Firefox say this isn't a bug.  But I do.  Afterall, one could argue that 
virtual domains are something like windows drive letters.  When you ask a 
broswer to get /index.html from a website - you really want 
$DOCUMENT_ROOT/index.html from the remote server - not index.html from the 
root of the entire file system.  On a local windows file system asking for 
/index.html is asking for $CURRENT_DRIVE/index.html - but Firefox wants to 
get index.html from the root of the file system, which doesn't exist on 
windows.

[*] OK, so maybe this isn't "real life" ;)

Frank