Re: Opening URLs and such...

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Christophe Fergeau writes:
> Currently, there's no easy way to set a handler for http:// apart from
> using the really scary file types and protocols capplet or whatever it
> is called, and setting a handler for http:// would indeed be a bad thing
> as you described in your mail.

The main issue i incur with not setting an http:// handler is that its slow 
(especially on dialup) and the code calling url_show (my applet in this 
case) can lockup for a significant amount of time. [1] So for the time being 
i've assigned a handler to http:// 

Also when calling gnome_vfs_url_show ("http://www.gnome.org";); for instance 
I've never actually gotten it to work. I always get an "Invalid Parameters" 
error. (when no handler is assigned to http:// of course) Does this work for 
you? 

> The "default applications" capplet doesn't set a http: url handler on
> purpose. At the moment it is setting a unknown: url handler, which makes
> the default browser setting pretty useless, it should set the default
> handler to open html files.

I've always sort of questioned the point of this dialog, since there is 
somewhat of an overlap between it and the file types capplet [2]. 

> Actually, the url handler stuff should only be used in very specific
> cases (mailto being one of those), it may make sense to only use these
> url handler settings as a last chance solution in gnome_vfs_url_show
> instead of them being the first thing gnome_vfs_url_show tries to use.
> But this would annoy people who want to open ftp:// locations in
> gnome-ftp :-/

I think this is a situation where you have to consider the effect of libs on 
ui. In this case especially, I think it makes total sense to use the file 
manager to manage ftp. The fact that it doesn't work as great as it could is 
a bug and it should be fixed. Ideally users should use the same interface 
for all types of file management. There really is no need for a seperate 
file manager for ftp in my opinion. It should just work. 

> > Another issue is specifying paths to files. Right now i have file://
> > associated with nautilus so if you specify a path to a folder it will pop 
> > open the nautilus window there. This works great until you specify a local 
> > path to a file (perhaps an html or abiword doc etc.) which nautilus does not 
> > have a  view for. 
>
> In that case, I feel that's a weird idea to do that :) Your idea about
> associating the directory mime type with nautilus is much more sane imo. 

Yeah, I did that as quick hack, before discovering that x-directory/normal 
wasn't associated with any application. I opened a bug on this as well, so 
hopefully it will get fixed soon :) 

dave 



[1] Well relatively, at the most a few seconds, maybe it would be best to 
move the call to url_show into a seperate thread in my applet? 

[2] Of course one could argue that the file types capplet is so huge and 
hard to use that it would be better to remove it and encourage mime 
configuration via nautilus somehow based on individual files and generalized 
to other files of similar type.