Re: Open URL in NSWorkspace

[Yen-Ju Chen]

On 8/3/07, Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
> 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.

  Yeah, you are right. I only think about url as http.
  But using 'xdg-open' as last resort still apply,
  which will open whatever application it need with freedesktop specification.
  We just need a GNUstep mechanism prior to the 'xdg-open'.

  PS. It's funny that this discussion turns into another topic.
  PPS. Having Cocoa compatibility helps porting Cocoa application. We
just have Vienna ported in Etoile (not announced yet). But I do think
it is not worth to keep compatible with all verions of OS X.
Supporting single latest OS X (or two) is enough. That's my personal
opinions.

  Have fun

  Yen-Ju

>
> Cheer,
> Fred
>