Re: RSS/RDF Aggregator

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, October 20, 2003, at 06:17 PM, Chris B. Vetter wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Oct 2003 10:10:11 -0700
> Alex Perez <aperez@student.santarosa.edu> wrote:
> > On Oct 18, 2003, at 9:56 AM, Marcus Müller wrote:
> > > [snip]
> > >  However, as I said, NSWorkspace (in GNUstep) doesn't implement
> > > opening of NSURLs. So, don't expect to see anything more besides the
> > > headlines - that is, until someone implements this functionality.
> > Would anyone be willing to implement this properly under GNUstep?
>
> This isn't entirely correct (but isn't entirely wrong either).
>
> NSWorkspace -openURL: checks whether the given argument is a file, and
> if it is, tries to open it (or notifies the appropriate application to
> open it). If it is a url, it returns NO.
>
> In this case, the example services should kick in, which try to launch
> 'mozilla', which isn't necessarily installed. However, the example
> services will check whether 'NSWebBrowser' is set and use the specified
> web browser instead of 'mozilla'.
>
> In most cases this should work fine, though I'm not entirely convinced
> that this is the way it should be implemented.

It sounds like quite a nice solution to me too ... but I'm not sure 
it's the
'right' way either.
The example services were just written as examples of how to write
services, so making them a core part of NSWorkspace functionality
might not be the best thing to do.

Perhaps we could have some user default specifying applications
to be used to open particular url schemes, and have NSWorkspace
launch those applications directly?  eg a GSUrlOpeners user default
whose value is a dictionary mapping url schemes to application names
and with a default application -
GSUrlOpeners = {
  http = mozilla;
  ftp = ftpbrowser;
  "" = mozilla;               // default used if required scheme is not present
}

Actually, I don't know how MacOS-X does it ... another interpretation
might be that the data from the referenced location should be retrieved
and stored in a temporary file, than an application launched to open
that file.  I don't *think* that's the purpose of the method ... does 
anyone
know?