Launching a local file in the default browser

[Brian Yennie]

> I tried it without the "file:///" in OS X as well as with other
> variations with less than three slashes. All did nothing. Perhaps it's
> the fact they are "/"-delimited paths that they require "file:///" ?

I would suspect this is true. "file://" (with two colons) is really the 
proper protocol, as it corresponds to "http://", "ftp://", etc.

Using "file://" is really just forming a proper URL- the oddity is that 
file paths also start with a slash, so you get the three slashes. But 
if you think of URLs as a protocol followed by a path, it starts to 
make sense- especially if you are accustomed to seeing "http://" by now.

FWIW

Brian