Re: Questions about URLs for Gopher search items

[solderpunk <solderpunk@SDF.ORG>]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 03:10:44AM +0100, Quentin Rameau wrote:
> Hello,

Howdy,

> > Could you explain how?  Sacc was one of the clients I tried.  I read the
> > man page.  It is clear that I can press `u` to see the URL of the menu
> > item my cursor is currently pointing at.  This is not the same thing as
> > seeing the URL of the item I am currently *at*.  After I have done a
> > Veronica search with sacc and I am staring at the results, how do I ask
> > sacc "Which URL am I at, right now?".
> 
> I added a 'U' keybinding for showing the page URI.
> If it's a type '7', it'll additionnaly show the search string after the
> selector, separated by a space.

Great work!  I am sure sacc users will appreciate this extra
functionality.

Can I ask what the rationale was for deciding on the space selector?  Not
a criticism, I am just curious.  To my mind, the real utility of a
feature like this is that if you end up somehere interesting you can ask
for the URL and then share it via email, IRC, XMPP, whatever.  The other
party can then copy and paste that URL into their client to end up where
you are.  Since sacc recognises the %09 syntax, why not use it in the
output so that this "round tripping" works?

> > The above experiment shows that almost no clients check for a tab in the
> > selector.  Most of them are interpeting an item type of 7 as literally
> > meaning "I need to ask the user for input".
> 
> sacc does ask the user for input, but with the answer pre-filled with
> the search string given in the URI so that the user can just press
> <Enter> to validate the search with the string.

Ah, I didn't notice this, maybe it was added since I installed sacc.  This
seems like a sensible behaviour.

Cheers,
Solderpunk