Using xdg-utils instead of htmlview, other hardwired apps

[Gilboa Davara]

Hello Ville,

On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 21:41 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I went through current devel packages that use htmlview or have unnecessarily 
> hardwired dependencies to firefox or evince.  Most of these should be using 
> xdg-open from xdg-utils instead.  Not hardcoding firefox as the browser and 
> evince as the PDF viewer should be trivial to understand, but why use 
> xdg-open instead of htmlview?  xdg-utils/xdg-open compared to htmlview:
> 
> - Works better in non-GNOME setups
> - Is a more standard implementation (more likely to be adopted upstream)
> - Understands the $BROWSER environment variable
> - Has slightly smaller dependency chain
> 
> So far, the only drawback of xdg-open compared to htmlview I've found is that 
> there doesn't seem to be real support for just opening a browser without an 
> URL to show in it.  "xdg-open about:blank" is one hacky workaround for this, 
> but I don't know how portable it is accross browsers (works at least in 
> Firefox and friends, and Konqueror).

This is a major issue for me (At least in icewm... less in gmrun) as the
browser button needs to open an empty browser window.
As you said, about:blank is not portable and pointing the browser to a
default web-page (say fedoraproject.org) will generate useless traffic.

Is there any chance that cleaner solution to this problem will be
implemented before we dump htmlview?

- Gilboa