Re: WWW interface functions in Gnome libraries?

[Graham Hughes <graham treepeople dyn ml org>]

On 20 May, Ben Darnell wrote:
> My $0.02: I would rather see this as a generalized URL interface,
> rather than a www/browser thing.  That way, any program could launch
> any url.  The user could have it configured to use netscape for
> everything, or they could use netscape for http, ncftp for ftp, gnus
> for news, etc.  There's no reason for the program calling this
> function to care whether it is actually sending you to a web or ftp
> site.  Perhaps the function should be called gnome_url_load() or
> something like that.

I agree that this is the way to go.  For ease of implementation, my
current first hack just runs netscape or whatever on all URLs; however,
I can very easily see extending it to specialize on the type
of URL.  The best way to do this is probably through CORBA, but I don't
know CORBA, so I'm sticking with my current implementation :-).

However, I did rename the functions to gnome_www_dispatch_url (run
browser on URL), gnome_www_open_url (open a FILE* to the URL), and
gnome_www_close_url (close the above FILE*) so you can hack it
yourself.  It doesn't do HTTP or FTP itself yet; I just use wget at the
moment to grab the information.
-- 
Graham Hughes <thrag@treepeople.dyn.ml.org> 
http://treepeople.dyn.ml.org/thrag/
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