Re: [Edbrowse-dev] protocol handlers and outputting to buffer

[Adam Thompson <arthompson1990@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 11:54:53AM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> Thank you for raising this issue.
> Edbrowse has native support for ftp, but ftp has no headers and no help, so edbrowse is a bit limited in its understanding, as is every other ftp client.
> I know what you mean about a gopher menu, ftp presents each directory as a menu, showing subdirectories and files.
> Clients understand this, as does edbrowse.
> I turn a menu listing into html, with links, ftp links, that take you to subdirectories and/or files.
> It works pretty well.
> I imagine something like that could be done for gopher, and I'd say it has to be native, like ftp, I don't think this is a plugin situation.
> I'll play around with the public gopher sites as time permits,
> this is something edbrowse should do.

Yeah, if it's doing the ftp list to html thing natively, where's that code?  I could probably put together similar for gopher, the tricky part is
getting the type info from the selectors into edbrowse.  Also, gopher has simple forms which we should probably implement.
My thought for using a plugin was that I could hammer together a proof of concept then look at the edbrowse
patch but it seems we simply don't have a way to integrate protocol handlers with the rest of the mechanism
closely enough to make this happen.
Helpfully there's a (fairly readable) RFC for all this and it's a very simple protocol. Also we don't need to bother with
anything more than plain gopher (there was a Gopher plus but I don't know of anyone who cares about it really) which simplifies all this.

On the subject of protocol handlers, if we can't get a variable output type (which is where this all started) I'd still
like to support handlers which can output to the buffer rather than just be ran as external processes.  That seems like a sensible thing to allow to me.
Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Adam.