intertwingly

zekel: No one had been quite as abused as the the little file: URL.  This URL was special because we had always used files and DOS paths (and no one at the time knew about path canonicalization attacks), everyone was quite sure what they looked like , acted like, and even tasted like.  It didn’t help that the file: protocol remained in RFC limbo as a platform/OS specific protocol.  So the browser and the browser’s little friends would take turns dressing a DOS path like an URL in a pink bunny suit and undressing the URL with a pair of rusty scissors, pretending it was the same DOS path they started with.  Only the simplest of URLs was able to withstand this abuse, and it soon became clear that something would have to be done, lest the little file: URLs go off on their own and be lost forever. [via Joshua Allen]