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Re: httpfs, tarfs --help


From: Michael Lucas-Smith
Subject: Re: httpfs, tarfs --help
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 09:48:06 +1100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221



2) Use some special `extensions translator' which automatically sets
translators for files with known extensions.


Yeah, this might be possible. For a start, you could work on a filemux. Then you need to couple the translator to start by filemux to the file type.

I personally think having translators start automatically for a MIME like 
system would be extremely impressive.

It allows you to 'cd' in to a file and see information in it, where otherwise 
you would have executed an application to interprete it's information for you.
For example: gz, tar, zip, .. a mirriade of other compression formats
html: a listing of all the other resources used inside the html file?
xml: a virtual structure inside the file - this'd be great for debugging xml
xslt: the same again.

I think what I'm suggesting is that throwing different protocols at a file will 
have it react differently. For example, if you pipe into an xslt file an xml 
file, it should produce you the output of the translation. If you cd in to the 
xslt file you should be able to browse it. If you 'read' the xslt file you're 
editing it or viewing it with some other application.

webpage.xslt < test.xml > output.xhtml
view output.html/branding.jpg

Again the same could be done for executables. If you enter in to it, you could 
be able to see symbolic links to the libraries it's going to use. Meta 
information about the program, etc. The list is endless. Not to mention the 
kinds of information available if you could have a node in /proc for every 
running process.

There are many protocols that files could support.

Piping, parameters, entering (like using 'cd').

From what I've seen of Hurd so far, it does some of this. Ie; the 'Pager' 
protocol when piping.

Just some of my own ideas really.

Michael Lucas-Smith





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