Re: lynx-dev PRINT OPTIONS PROBLEM

[Mike Castle]

Amazingly enough Al Gilman said:
> One possible variation on this approach would be that we not
> extend the set of lynx-internal URL types, but rather that we use
> the existing lynxcgi URL type and create one or more predefined
> CGIs that are actually executed by the lynx code internally and
> do the preferences management.  Then the code that generates the
> HTML form for option updating doesn't have to extend HTML
> further, it merely has to identify as its ACTION one of the
> lynx-reserved URLs for the predefined internal CGIs.  Lynx can
> reserve URIs in this namespace pretty safely.  Things like 
> lynxcgi://localhost/lynxroot/lib/foo.cgi .


Hmmm.  I'm a bit confused by what you are implying here.

Should this be a true cgi script that is run on the localhost?  Or rather,
move the special  parsing from the getfile() function (which currently has
to deal with LYNXPRINT, lynxcgi, and so on), into whatever function handles
the lynxcgi stuff?

The former, of course, is non-portable and probably subject to a bunch of
problem with maintaining sychronicity.

The latter looks promising.  I'm not sure if there is currently any
performance hit within getfile() where it does a whold bunch of checks
before handing it off to the appropriate subsystem.

The problem is, there are a whole bunch of cases where being able to check
the special url types is very convenient, whereas modifying that code to
recognize it's a lynxcgi: type url, so then check under that to see if
special handling is needed, would be a major pain.

Of course, helper functions to do this would be nice.

While I think abstracting the special internal url handling within lynx a
bit more would be a Good Thing(tm), I think it would require a significant
amount of effort to do and to test that everything still works.

mrc
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