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Re: Open URL in NSWorkspace


From: Fred Kiefer
Subject: Re: Open URL in NSWorkspace
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:00:16 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.12 (X11/20060911)

Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
> Currently [NSWorkspace -openURL:] does nothing if the url is not a file.
> I propose to have a 'GSWebBrowserApplication' in user default
> (application and NSGlobalDomain) as 'GSWorkspaceApplication'.
> Then NSWorkspace can check whether users specify a web browser and
> open the url with that web browser.
> If there is no 'GSWebBrowserApplication' in user default,
> maybe it can try to open the url with 'xdg-open' as last resort.
> (http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-open.html).
> While it may not be the best solution,
> I personally think it is better than doing nothing.
> But 'xdg-open' may be missing or installed in different place
> depending on the OS.
> So it may take some efforts to find it.
> 

I disagree here. Sure the current behaviour is wrong and needs to be
changes. But why should we open up URLs with a web browser? An URL just
specifies how to get to a specific set of data, the data itself should
then be treated just like any other file of that type. If it is HTML
then it should be passed on to a web browser, but if it is anything else
the proper application for this type should be started.

This of course requires some bigger change in the way GNUstep currently
handles URL. My view here is that in the long run we should regard all
resources as URLs and drop the special handling we now have in place for
files and just support URLs (converting normal file names to file URLs).
This requires changes to NSApplication, NSWorkspace, NSDocument and a
few other places. As currently I am almost alone working on GNUstep gui
(and back for that matter), it will take some time for these things to
happen. Still it is better to wait that time than to add some hack to
start all URLs with a web browser, which is almost as wrong as the
current behaviour.

Cheer,
Fred




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