LYNX-DEV Expanding the role of externals

[Jason F. McBrayer]

Hi.  Having just finished the OS/2 port of 2.8 (patches coming Real
Soon Now), I've just gotten my first experiences with using
externals.  I'm using wget as an external for http and ncftp as an
external for ftp, and they work great, they do.  But I had been
expecting externals (not having seen them) to work like the P)rint or
D)ownload pages, so that one could have more than one external utility
for a given protocol.  I'd still like to see that implemented if
anyone feels up to it, because:

1) It makes trivial Java support, well, trivial.  Just define
   appletviewer as one of your viewers for http.  You can do that now,
   but you lose the ability to have an external downloader for http.
2) You could have separate sets of options to wget depending on whether
   you want to download a single document or a full directory tree.
3) Under X, OS/2 PM, or Win32, you could open up a new Lynx window for
   a new page, in the style of reading encouraged by the Opera
   browser. 

Right now you can do any one of these, but not all of them.  I suppose
the tricky part is building separate external pages for each protocol,
but I think the benefits would be substantial.

-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jason F. McBrayer              address@hidden |
| The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill   |   
| forever.                   (R.W. Chambers _The King in Yellow_ |