inconsistent button behavior (was: Re: nnfolder doesn't like mime & no base64 extracting(?))

[John H Palmieri <John.H.Palmieri.2@nd.edu>]

Pterodactyl Gnus v0.33
GNU Emacs 20.3.1 (sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1, X toolkit) of Thu Aug 27 1998 on darwin

George J McNinch <McNinch.1@nd.edu> writes:

  [snip]
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 	       George McNinch [Mailto:McNinch.1@nd.edu]
> 		      <URL:www.nd.edu/~gmcninch>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both of these lines produce buttons when I read the message with gnus,
but the second one doesn't quite work right.  (I don't know if it's
because of the missing 'http://', but the behavior looks buggy to me
regardless.)

As it stands, if I have Netscape (since browse-url-netscape-function
is set to 'browse-url-netscape) running already, then clicking on this
button takes me to

     http://www.nd.edu/~gmcninch

If I don't have Netscape running, then clicking on the button starts
Netscape, but tries to go to the URL

     file:/afs/nd.edu/user4/jpalmier/www.nd.edu/~gmcninch

I understand that the URL may be malformed, but should there really be
a difference in behavior depending on whether I have a web browser
running or not?

(I can't tell how much this depends on the web browser.  With w3,
i.e., with 

   (setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-w3)

the button does the same thing--goes to http://...--whether w3 was
"running already" or not.  I don't feel like installing any Microsoft
products today to test what happens there; and Mosaic goes to the
correct URL if it is *not* running already, but goes to the wrong
place--appends www.nd.edu/~gmcninch to the currently displayed URL--if
it *is* running.)

It certainly could be that gnus (and widget and whatever else) is
doing as good a job as it can on a malformed URL, and then that
different web browsers handle the results differently.  But it could
also be a bug.  Which is it?

-- 
John H. Palmieri
e-mail: palmieri@member.ams.org        205 Computing/Mathematics Building
URL: http://www.nd.edu/~jpalmier/      University of Notre Dame
(219) 631-8846                         Notre Dame, IN 46556