  A broad class of contour gauges is shown to be determined by admissible
contractions of the geometrical region considered and a suitable equivalence
class of curves is defined. In the special case of magnetostatics, the relevant
electromagnetic potentials are directly related to the ponderomotive forces.
Schwinger's method of extracting a gauge invariant factor from the fermion
propagator could, it is argued, lead to incorrect results. Dirac brackets of
both Maxwell and Yang-Mills theories are given for arbitrary admissible
space-like paths. It is shown how to define a non-abelian flux and local
charges which obey a local charge algebra. Fields associated with the charges
differ from the electric fields of the theory by singular topological terms; to
avoid this obstruction to the Gauss law it is necessary to exclude a single,
gauge fixing curve from the region considered.
