UNC links

The Universal Naming Convention, or UNC, specifies a common syntax to describe the location of a network resource, such as a shared file, directory, or printer. The UNC syntax for Windows systems is as follows:

UNCs differ from URLs in that they do not have a protocol: prefix and that they can contain embedded spaces. In corporate use of MediaWiki, it is often useful to paste a UNC from Windows Explorer directly into a wiki page.

Browser compatibility

 * With Internet Explorer on Windows UNC Links work without exception.


 * A recent patch applied to both IE8 and IE9 now requires the Wiki site to be in the Intranet Sites list for this to work correctly.


 * With Firefox  links are disabled by default when appearing in non-local webpages. See:  and [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_don%27t_work this mozillaZine article] for how to enable them.


 * The mozillaZine article referenced is somewhat dated.


 * For Google Chrome links are also disabled.  They can be enabled using the enable-local-file-links extension.