Some things, like the Text object in particular, export only ASCII
and RTF pasteboard types. I'd still remain useful, I think, if tools
like OmniWeb, etc., are able to parse ASCII input and determine,
for instance, if this is a URL, and use it as such. An example of
this is a shareware app we wrote called "Phone".
Phone allows people to store records in plain ASCII format. The newest
(unreleased) version contains a recognition engine based on regular
expressions. In this way, Phone recognizes telephone numbers and email
addresses, and places an icon beside them. Clicking the icon will
cause Phone to dial the phone, or open up email in Eloquent.app or Mail.app.
It's trivial for the user to extend Phone via the expression:
".+://.+" = "url";
And a directive:
"url:service:Open URL";
Which would put any matched pattern on the pasteboard when it's icon is
clicked, whereapon the "Open URL" service item is invoked via NXPerformService()
(which is an OmniWeb service).
If these applications decided that they no longer wanted to consider ASCII
text as a URL or as HTML, then it would be much harder for me to build
this kind of generic, extensible functionality into Phone.
So, those are just some comments. Again, I don't know very much about
webbing, etc., so I may be off base. Please feel free to correct me on
anything I may be missing.
- darcy
Greg Kostello <greg@pages.com> wrote:
>
> To all:
>
> Rohit was very kind to get this organized. NeXTStep has played an important
> role in WWW development from the beginning. There has been NeXTStep software
> available for the WWW since the early days :). Pages has received a
> tremendous interest in our WebPages since our first announcement. In order
> to make NeXT products better integrated, a number of us have been
> commincating about standards for the WWW as it relates to NeXTStep and Rohit
> has gone far to organize us. So kudos to him.
>
> Let me tell you about a recent decision we have come to. Pages, (Sen:te)
> SpiderWoman, (Rohit)eText and (William Shipley) OmniWeb have agreed to
> support a common pasteboard type for URLs. (NeXT leaves it up to ISVs to
> define new PB types).
>
> The new pasteboard type is W3URIPboardType. This is simply text which
> defines a URI. See the pages at
> http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/ for a complete definition
> of the BNF. This will allow, among other things, browsers and editors to
> share common data for drag and drop. For consistency, future related
> pasteboard types should probably begin with the prefix W3.
>
> Questions/Comments?
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Greg Kostello
> Software Engineer greg@pages.com
> Pages Software Inc NeXT mail accepted
> (619) 492-9050x217
> http://www.pages.com/
>
>
> [Here is a historical thread. Skip if your not interested]
>
> Marco,
>
> I believe that W3URIPboardType is the right naming convention. I think any
> more related pasteboard types should begin with the W3 prefix since NX
> belongs to NeXT.
>
> If anyone has any objections or further input please voice them now.
>
> Greg
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> Date: Thu, 19 Jan 95 14:47:29 +0100
> From: Marco Scheurer <marco@sentenext1.epfl.ch>
>
> Greg,
>
> Have we decided yet what the name of the new pasteboard type will be?
> Last thing I heard when we met was W3URIPboardType. Is that right?
>
> Thanks,
>
> marco
>
> From: khare@xent.caltech.edu (Rohit Khare)
> Date: Sun, 1 Jan 1995 12:45:43 -0800
> To: Greg Kostello <greg@pages.com>
> Subject: Re: New URL/URI Pasteboard type
> Reply-To: khare@caltech.edu
>
> Just a first reaction (I was gone for the holidays)
>
> I think that we should definitely describe an URL pasteboard type. I'm
> willing to accept variations in whether or not to prefix it by URL:, but I'm
> willing to accept that uncertainty, since we'll be parsing these strings
> anyway.
> The broader question, though, is that we need an HTML pb type, of which this
> whole URL thing is a special case. One can even imagine an
> HTMLPboardType/URLPboardType combination usage analagous to "Doc
> Selection"/NXFilenamePboardType (though I seem to have problems with it,
> since other apps take the filename text over the selection text, even though
> the filename is later on the [pb types] list).
>
> Finally, the whole enchilada solution might piggyback off of the PB
> filtering mechanism to return the correct "app" for a given URL: i.e. it
> should return Gopher.app, WAIStation.app, etc depending on the type. It's
> what eText would like to do, since it treats services as offboard
> fucntionality, and on NeXTSTEP (as opposed to X), it makes perfect sense to
> use apps tailored for each task (of course, we still want centralized
> history and UI, but that's not my job, is it? :)
>
> Thanks,
> Rohit
>
> PS. Feel free to circulate; I'll read over the rest of your mail and let you
> know.
>
> Date: Wed, 21 Dec 94 19:04:55 +0100
> From: Marco Scheurer <scheurer@lithnext.epfl.ch>
> To: greg@pages.com
> Subject: URI pasteboard
>
> We agree with your proposal. I think that this subject already has been
> raised by Rohit Khare, the author of eText. It could be worth checking with
> him
if anything has been done on his side.
> We were planning about having filetype and urltype pasteboard information
> attached to the icons in SpiderWoman.
>
> On another subject, I really liked your message in the news about what a
> WYSIWYG html editor can be, thanks.
>
> Later,
> Marco
> Sen:te
>
> Original Thread sent to Next and forwarded to Wil and Marco:
>
> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 94 11:29:25 PST
> From: greg (To: William Shipley <wjs@omnigroup.com>,
> scheurer@lithnext.epfl.ch)
To: William Shipley <wjs@omnigroup.com>,
> scheurer@lithnext.epfl.ch
Subject: New URL/URI Pasteboard type
> Cc: jim, peter
>
> William Shipley and Marco Scheurer ,
>
> In the spirit of cooperation Pages would like to accept URI information via
> the pasteboard. Unfortunately NeXT doesn't seem to register pasteboard types
> like they do file formats. Therefore, we propose a new public pasteboard
> type
>
> NXAtom NXURIPboardType = "NeXT Universal Resource Identifier
> pasteboard type"
>
> that other apps will be able to accept whenever a URL/URI is copied/dragged
> from an application.
>
> Please let me know what you think. If you have already defined a public
> type, we would be happy to adopted it.
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Greg Kostello
> Software Engineer greg@pages.com
> Pages Software Inc NeXT mail accepted
> (619) 492-9050x217
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Lynn Cox <Lynn_Cox@NeXT.COM>
> Date: Thu, 15 Dec 94 13:59:14 -0800
> To: greg@pages.com
> Subject: [63100] Request for new pasteboard type
> Reply-To: Lynn_Cox@NeXT.COM
>
> Greg,
>
> In your email you asked if NeXT would "register" a new pasteboard type.
> Were you thinking of register in the same manner that we register file
> extensions? We do not currently register pasteboard types. I will forward
> your pasteboard type suggestion to engineering for their review.
>
> Lynn Cox
> NeXT Developer Support
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 94 09:27:47 PST
> From: greg (To: Lynn_Cox@NeXT.COM)
> To: Lynn_Cox@NeXT.COM
> Subject: Request for new pasteboard type
>
> Lynn,
>
> We would like NeXT register a new pasteboard type
>
> NXAtom NXURIPboardType = "NeXT Universal Resource Identifier
> pasteboard type"
>
> for sharing URL type information via the pasteboard.
>
> Essentially the data would be expected to follow the HTML 2.0 specification
> e.g. type="prefix://path/subpath/fileName">.
> This will allow us to share HTML anchor specifications with other
> browsers/editors such as HTML browsers OmniWeb and SpiderWoman.
>
> Thanks in advance.
> -------------------------------------------
> Greg Kostello
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Follow-up From Marco and Wil:
>
>
> Date: Wed, 21 Dec 94 19:04:55 +0100
> From: Marco Scheurer <scheurer@lithnext.epfl.ch>
> To: greg@pages.com
> Subject: URI pasteboard
>
> We agree with your proposal. I think that this subject already has been
> raised by Rohit Khare, the author of eText. It could be worth checking with
> him
if anything has been done on his side.
> We were planning about having filetype and urltype pasteboard information
> attached to the icons in SpiderWoman.
>
> On another subject, I really liked your message in the news about what a
> WYSIWYG html editor can be, thanks.
>
> Later,
> Marco
> Sen:te
>
> Date: Mon, 26 Dec 94 12:01:19 PST
> From: greg (To: wjs@omnigroup.com)
> To: wjs@omnigroup.com
> Subject: Re: New URL/URI Pasteboard type
> Cc: wim@omnigroup.com, William Shipley <wjs@omnigroup.com>,
> scheurer@lithnext.epfl.ch, jim@pages.com, peter@pages.com
>
> Wil,
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> For simplicity's sake, I would not expect the URI to be prefaced with
> "URL:". However, if we were to adopt this as a standard, what
> advantages/disadvantages do you see to tagging the text in this manner.
> We would probably accept the data in either format and parse the text
> accordingly.
> Greg
> -------------------------------------------
> Greg Kostello
> Software Engineer greg@pages.com
> Pages Software Inc NeXT mail accepted
> (619) 492-9050x217
> http://www.pages.com/
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: William Shipley <wjs@omnigroup.com>
> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 94 15:51:56 -0800
> To: Greg Kostello <greg@pages.com>, wim@omnigroup.com
> Subject: Re: New URL/URI Pasteboard type
>
> This type is great with us. I was just about to propose the exact same
> thing.
> There seems to be some disagreement about whether a URI that is a URL
> contains "URL:" at the beginning or not. Which way are you guys doing it?
>
> -Wil
>
> [End synopsis]
>
>
>