Actually, it is a thought provoking idea. Why stop at URLs, though?
I would see it being kind of useful in the Microsoft-ish direction of
internet-integration. Create a "filesystem" which performs anonymous
(or not; don't know much about filesystems yet) FTP, HTTP fetches,
etc. Imagine getting news by simply cat'ing /net/http/www.cnn.com.
Or grabbing a file of yours on another system (say serv1.moo.edu)
by cp /net/ftp/serv1.moo.edu/the/file/is/here/file.txt file.txt
The user/admin can choose to use the "filesystem" or not by mounting it
or not or deselecting it in his/her kernel config, to add some choice
in the matter and for a modicum of security.
Organize the filesystem by protocol at the top layer, and use different
controls to change parameters (like ioctl, but I don't know if such
controls exist for such things. Such a tool would make the filesystem
able to do non-anonymous ftp and control some bits.
It would be a huge challenge, though. I think it would be worth it, though.
-Joseph
--
Joseph---------------------------------------------------------jap3003@ksu.edu
"If the entire earth, land and water, were covered with computers, IPv6 would
allow 7x10^23 IP addresses per square meter. [...] While it was not the
intention to give every molecule on the surface of the earth its own IP
address, we are not that far off."
-Tannenbaum, _Computer_Networks_, 3rd Edition
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