From kde Sun Jun 04 20:59:33 2000 From: "Evan E." Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2000 20:59:33 +0000 To: kde Subject: User Definable Protocols? X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde&m=96015237309542 ( This deals with KDE2, and is strictly an idea that I don't have the time to implement myself. It is only an idea. There is no reason to demand that I do it just because I thunked it. It may even be done already. ) I was just reading Slashdot, and came across the following post (excerpted): Well, yeah, but underneath KDE is still the "what the f-ck is that?" filesystem we endearingly call ext2. Try explaining to a user some time why saving a file to /tmp is a Bad Idea. Or where their home directory is ("Why can't I save it to C:\.. er.. / ? It worked fine under windows!"). An interface is not the mere sum of its components... It occured to me that kio has plenty of protocols that it deals with: for instance, http, file, ftp, smb. To the user these all take the form of file://whatever. Can users come back and plug in additional functionality? My first thought ran to defining "c" as being your home directory, so people migrating from windows could save to their c://my documents/ location (with a bit of tweaking, possibly even c:\my documents\). Having had to deal with belligerent office workers (sales and attorneys are the worst), the flexability to appease this issue would gratify people who don't understand folders in windows, and can't figure out the network drive (always asking their secretary to load a shared file). Real world issues. Then I started thinking about what *I* would like. I would love home: and desktop: (or dt:) defined for my own use to jump to in the file system. I would love tim: and ritz: to jump to ftp sessions on my servers. These are personal tweaks that I would love to edit in a configuration file. Maybe a pub: that jumps to a shared ftp or nfs directory. Then the really good ideas started coming: How about a loadable module so that when you plug in your digital camera, you can go to casio:// (or camera://) and browse the images there? scanner:// provides a pseudo image file that when you load it, scans the current document loaded in the scanner. cam:// has an image file and video file... open either for your attached web cam to feed data any application. Heck... the speakerphone modem cards could use phone://561-555-3782 to connect to someone, your tvtuner could use tv://5 or tv://wxel or tv://showtime to view your images (this is defined in rfc 2838 in a slightly different format. Modification for local channels on a tv card might be necessary. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2838.txt ). Since Konqueror already supports viewing file types, this would be the flip side to provide easy access to all devices. A network protocol to this would also be easy, since you are providing a pseudo file system anyway. If you don't have a TV card in that particular computer, but you do have a nice 100 switched network, just hit tv://myothersystem/showtime/video.mpeg (or tv://myothersystem/showtime/framegrab.jpeg). You'll get a mpeg stream that encodes on one end, and transparantly passes across the network into your system. For network scanners and such this would be a great way of working. If you want to password protect the device, you can: stage a popup a la http authorization or bookmark the tv://user@myothersystem/showtime format. (I forget the format for the password in the URL). I can even see an early gleam of an idea for printer:// and other output devices... drag and drop files in formats that can be rendered (via Konqueror plug-ins?) on that device. Or save files to "printer:". Again, printer://frontoffice/ would be your network printer (or printer:frontoffice). kio is a powerful feature in its current form. This is one of the things that makes me use KDE. My generous thanks and heartfelt gratitude goes to the people who have coded it this far... here's some daydreaming and food for thought for where it might go next... if you haven't already gotten there. :) Summary/goals: The concept is abstraction via loadable modules (or config files) to devices or locations via a URL. Network transparancy has a convenient and easily understood metaphor, and the whole is compatable with current conventions. Read only, write only and R/W devices with any set of limitations can be addressed by *any* application by translation to a common file format that makes sense to that device. -- Evan -- Send posts to: kde@lists.netcentral.net Send all commands to: kde-request@lists.netcentral.net Put your command in the SUBJECT of the message: "subscribe", "unsubscribe", "set digest on", or "set digest off" PLEASE READ THE ARCHIVED MESSAGES AT http://lists.kde.org/ BEFORE POSTING ********************************************************************** This list is from your pals at NetCentral