Using xdg-utils instead of htmlview, other hardwired apps

[Ville Skyttä]

On Saturday 06 October 2007, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 21:41 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
>
> > So far, the only drawback of xdg-open compared to htmlview I've found is
> > that there doesn't seem to be real support for just opening a browser
> > without an URL to show in it.  "xdg-open about:blank" is one hacky
> > workaround for this, but I don't know how portable it is accross browsers
> > (works at least in Firefox and friends, and Konqueror).

By the way, there are two more features in htmlview that xdg-open lacks: error 
dialogs and the ability to open a tty browser in a GUI console.

> This is a major issue for me (At least in icewm... less in gmrun) as the
> browser button needs to open an empty browser window.
> As you said, about:blank is not portable and pointing the browser to a
> default web-page (say fedoraproject.org) will generate useless traffic.

For example /usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html could be used for that.  However, 
doing so has some problems too; eg. it disrespects the user configured home 
page for the browser, does not pick a localized version of that index.html, 
and fedora-release-notes could be conceivably not installed in some setups.

> Is there any chance that cleaner solution to this problem will be
> implemented before we dump htmlview?

I think in cases where xdg-open doesn't provide a satisfactory solution, we 
can stick with htmlview.  And htmlview could be internally changed to use 
xdg-open for cases where it is passed an argument which would make it honor 
non-GNOME desktop settings better too.