WWW interface functions in Gnome libraries?

[Graham Hughes <graham treepeople dyn ml org>]

Some background: I ran KDE for some time a ways back, and the only
thing that *really* impressed me was knotes, their post it note
program.  gpostit isn't really the same thing, so I was going to have a
look at basically rewriting knotes to use Gtk.

One of the cool things knotes could do is if you double clicked on a
URL, it would launch a new browser window on that site; it made it easy
to store a list of places to look at.  Knotes has an easy time of this,
because there exists a standard web browser.

Gnome has no analogue, but it might be useful to provide an API and a
standard implementation (that invokes netscape or something, or even
just xterm -e lynx) so a) all web code is isolated, and if we decide to
specially handle e.g. ftp:// URLs and pass them to gmc, we only have to
change one thing, b) a standard web browser may exist in future, and c)
people shouldn't really have to tell each and every program `No, use
Lynx!'

Some simple grepping of the header files implies that such a beast
doesn't exist; am I totally off base here, or would this be considered
useful?

In the event that it *is* considered useful, does this seem like a sane
API?

	void gnome_www_dispatch_browser(gchar * url);

Run the default browser on url.

	gint gnome_www_get_url(gchar * url, gchar * mimetype,
			       gint size);

Get the contents of the URL at url, writing the MIME type into mimetype
(at most size characters), returning a fd containing the data.
-- 
Graham Hughes <thrag@treepeople.dyn.ml.org> 
http://treepeople.dyn.ml.org/thrag/
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