Re: About the Gnome Help browser

[Stephanos Piperoglou <sp249 cam ac uk>]

On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Marc Ewing wrote:

> I think that's true, but it does make things easier for the user.
> Mike and I have been thinking along the lines of having "shortcuts"
> like "man:ls" and "info:emacs" that are mapped to real URLs by
> the help system.  For example, before *any* URL parsing happens,
> the reference string is passed through something like
> resolveShortcuts() that rewrites "man:ls" to "file:/usr/man/man1/ls.1"
> based on its configuration and what it find on the filesystem.

Yup, this sounds nice. But we should make sure that everything is
transformed into the proper syntax before it's passed to the system and
DISPLAYED AS SUCH. One of the things that Netscape's tradition of
interpreting URL's literaly is that people thought that something like
www.somewhere.com is a complete URL (and started using it in HTML, and so
on, and so forth).

Also, name completion on the man: scheme based on the whatis database would
be really, really, REALLY nice. Nobody's ever thought of that before, but
I'd kill for it.

-- Stephanos Piperoglou -- sp249@cam.ac.uk -------------------
All I want is a little love and a lot of money. In that order.