Re: lynx-dev lynx: url form "aol://4344:932.foo.bar.1234.5678/"

[brian j. pardy]

David Combs wrote:
> Tje sote www/,egastproes/cp, ///
>   ),u mewest cr[utp scje,e
> 
> The site www.megastories.com
>  (my newest crypto scheme
> 
>    (via misplaced right hand on keyboard!)

Hah!

> Anyway, there is this www.megastories.com, pretty good
> news-articles on world events, unwashed dresses, etc --
> but you click on certain items, and get "badly formed addrss"
> or some such error message from Lynx.
> 
> Doing L you can see more.
> 
> (items [39] and [40])
> 
> Now I know that "aol://<digits>" is an insane (or is it?)
> url -- but from what I read in the newspaper, AOL houses
> 50% of the users of the internet.
> 
> PERHAPS, if aol has LOTS of good content, and I don't
> know that, except for this one site, then should we
> special-case their url?

IIRC, those are URLs that the AOL web browser interprets, and then uses to
tell the AOL client software to open up certain areas on the service. I
don't think there is any way to access them without using AOL's system
client.

> QUESTION: what do "the big (bad) two" do with such
> a url?

The big bad one with a Linux port tries to parse it as if 'aol:' is a
domain, and prepends http:// to the beginning of it, then fails miserably.

> Likewise, does compuserv(e) also have such a scheme?

I have no idea.

> Queston: should these be hard-coded into lynx, or
> via some mapping-facility (of someone can figure
> out what a better-looking address might be that
> goes to the same place)?

I don't believe there's any way to translate an aol:// address to anything
else, but I could be wrong.

-- 
Your fault: core dumped
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.