user friendly uri names

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

Hi everyone,

 'nother quick (looking at length of this e-mail now, scratch that)
annoying idea - would something like a user-friendly name to a uri type
be a good thing?  I.e., if a uri is preferences://, it might be shown to
the user (say, in the Nautilus uri selector/entry) as "User
Preferences".  a uri of applications://Office/ migth be shown as
"Applications Menu/Office".  a uri of camera://HP%20308 (assuming we
ever get another usable gphoto gnome-vfs plugin) could be shown as
"Digital Cameras/HP 308".

 Some uri protocols it may be a better idea to not show a user-name, so
they should be optional.  For example, "World Wide Web/www.gnome.org"
looks not only silly, but everyone who has used the web before is just
used to http://.  Lots of places around the web, billboards, etc. print
http://theirdomain, and the non-web-experienced users might freak out
seeing "World Wide Web/theirdomain" instead.  Not to mention since http
is used for a billion things beyond the Web these days, there's probably
not a good name to use besides HTTP anyways.  ;-)

 Another issue is that users, being used to seeing "Cameras/HP 308",
might try to type in "Cameras" to get a listing of their cameras.  This
then can be confusing; did they mean the camera:// uri, or a sub-folder
named Cameras?  if no such sub-folder exists, the choice may be clear,
but if it does, then what?  the choice has to be the same, otherwise
it's confusing, ambiguous behaviour.  This could be offset by having the
uri entry box show the real uri, and then set the title of the window to
the user-friendly name.  Additionally, users shouldn't have to type
uri's that often.  We should have something similar to Windows "My
Computer" to get a list of things like camera:// and such.  There are
plenty of people like my father who are quite capable at using and
understanding computer technology, but still type at 3 words per minute
and have a hard time remembering web addresses/uri's without his
Favorites folder.  ^,^

 gnome-vfs plugins might also be allowed to have their own
transformation function; as an example, the applications:// plugin could
be given the path "/Other/", and return something like " -> Other", so
it would be displayed as "Applications -> Other" to the user (the common
way menu heirarchies are written in instructions).  This would compound
on the above previous issue tho, and may result in many wildly differing
outputs ("Applications -> Other", "Digital Camera: HP 308", "Palm Pilot
-- Model Blah", "RPM Database, Abiword", etc.)  Probably not worth the
pain, but I figured if I was going to babble about a feature, I should
at least be thorough about it.  ;-)

Anyways, yes. </babble>

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.