Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 11:10:18 -0400 From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Should URL's be pervasive. Message-ID: <20010830111018.A97057@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
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I ran into a pair of all too common annoyances this morning that got me thinking. Via the magic of cut and paste I ended up with the following two sorts of command lines: mutt mailto:bicknell@ufp.org traceroute http://www.ufp.org/ These of course come from the 'copy link location' available in most browsers. When pasted into most Unix commands (with the exception of fetch and lynx, of course) the result is something that just doesn't work. This got me thinking, should all commands know how to take an URL, and 'do the right thing'? Could this be made easy by providing a standard URL parsing library that all commands could use for parsing? I'm not yet sure I understand the downsides. In the commands above I am 99.9% sure mutt should know how to deal with a mailto URL, after all it is a mail client. I am very unsure if I want telnet to be able to take an arbitrary URL and just pull out the host bit, and do a traceroute. It seems to make some sense in this case, but it could cause overloading issues in other cases. I'll provide some more examples, but I'd like to get some opinions of if these things should work, and more importantly if this should be a design goal/standard for projects like FreeBSD. ftp ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/ talk mailto:bicknell@ussenterprise.ufp.org mount nfs://server.ufp.org/partition/ file:/mnt ssh ssh://bicknell@www.ufp.org/ If you want to go really crazy, what about making the shell know about prefered applications, and parse URL's directly. Command lines like this could work: % mailto:bicknell@ufp.org Which starts mutt with the argument 'bicknell@ufp.org', or % http://www.ufp.org/ Which fires off netscape/lynx/whatever pointed at www.ufp.org? -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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