Re: lynx-dev URL guessing for .CA domain suggestion

[David Combs]

> From address@hidden Wed Oct  7 20:47:33 1998
> Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 20:23:29 -0700 (MST)
> From: Dave Eaton <address@hidden>
> 
> On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Leonid Pauzner wrote:
> 
> > It would be really great to disable URL guessing for hosts ends
> > with "dot + two letters" since it most likely a country code
> > ...[clip]...
> > a typo in user-defined URL fall into the obviously stupid "URL guessing"
> > proccess like msk.ru.org/msk.ru.edu etc. - they definitely not exists.
> 
> While there is no "msk.ru.org" or "msk.ru.edu", the domains you picked    
> do exist:
>  
>  Rogers University (Tulsa, OK) = RU.EDU
>  Renaissance Universal (Mainz, DE) = RU.ORG
> 
> Personaly, I'm not a fan of domain guessing ... it masks all the other
> possibilities from the very user who doesn't know enough about the
> Internet to know to look elsewhere. The classic example is those who just
> enter "whitehouse" and get the X-rated site www.whitehouse.com, not the
> one at www.whitehouse.gov.
> 
> If you are going to change the "guess" logic, please be careful not to
> make it miss even more possibilities.
> 
> If you want to make it more exotic, I'd suggest to provide a <<<CONFIG>>> file
> entry so the user can define what to guess in what order.


NO, NO, NO, DAMMIT, NO!!!!

Make it either a RUNTIME option (changeable WHILE in midst of lynx),
or an "option" on cmd line, or .cfg --- TEMPORARILY -- until some time
is available to make ALL these things doable FROM a RUNNING lynx.

These config-options are HORRIBLE -- yes, HORRIBLE -- because those
who use the "computer's" version of lynx (compiled by someone
else) then have NO way to change them -- EVER -- without
going through the grief (and disk space, no small thing for those
on "shell accounts" where we have to PAY $$$ for extra disk usage)
of building our own -- SOLELY because of some stupid
config options.

Sorry about the rant -- but after all the recent talk about
options etc being "soon" worked on and mostly being made
changeable DURING a run -- seeing the suggestion to add
even more to the config options, just drives me a bit
insane.

Especially for an option that you might want to change back and
forth, depending on the kind of addresses one is looking-up.

Cheers, everyone.

David



PS: an IDEA (yeah, another great idea from David):

Lets add some options (via minus signs) to the URL!

So you could use the usual fooUrl  (eg file://blah),
OR "-fooOpt `cat myUrlOpts.txt` -barOpt (undoes one of
myUrlOpts.txt's opts) file://blah".

Or, instead of the longwinded `cat foo.txt`,
maybe just @foo.txt  eg the options "at" foo.txt
(perhaps symbolic link).

This idea of adding syntax to a lookup-name can be
really great, eg in some languages' "open" stmt; works
really neatly.  Read left to right, so further ones
override earlier ones.

---

Maybe if not for THIS suggested option about adding
thingies to the end of url's, but for OTHER things
in lynx.  Is a powerful idea for adding "this time
only" options, no setting & then unsetting needed.