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]