though ffap would recognize web page without http:// in front.

[Dan Jacobson]

Probably I was expecting too much, thinking ffap would interpret 
       banyan.dlut.edu.cn/~ygh as
http://banyan.dlut.edu.cn/~ygh
when I put the cursor on it and hit C-x C-f.  I got:
Pinging banyan.dlut.edu.cn (The People's Republic of China)...
byte-code: banyan.dlut.edu.cn/discard Temporary failure in name resolution

I wanted it to just try and get the web page which would register the
request with wwwoffle.  Instead it is trying to do something more fancy.

See, given such names, wwwoffle knows what to do:
$ wwwoffle banyan.dlut.edu.cn/~ygh
Getting: http://banyan.dlut.edu.cn/~ygh

So does mozilla.
Lynx too perhaps, but I'm not sure.  Maybe it forgot $http_proxy in
this case.
$ lynx banyan.dlut.edu.cn/~ygh

Looking up banyan.dlut.edu.cn first
Looking up www.banyan.dlut.edu.cn.com, guessing...
Looking up www.banyan.dlut.edu.cn.edu, guessing...
Looking up www.banyan.dlut.edu.cn.net, guessing...
Looking up www.banyan.dlut.edu.cn.org, guessing...
Can't Access `file://localhost/home/jidanni/banyan.dlut.edu.cn/~ygh'
Alert!: Unable to access document.

lynx: Can't access startfile 
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780