Krishna Tateneni

tateneni@pluto.njcc.com

Yves Arrouye

yves@realnames.com

02/02/2001 1.00.00 KDE KControl enhanced browsing browsing &konqueror; offers some features to enhance your browsing experience. Currently, two such features are Internet Keywords and Web Shortcuts. You may already have noticed that &kde; is very internet friendly. For example, you can click on the Run menu item or type the keyboard shortcut assigned to that command (AltF2, unless you have changed it) and type in a URI. Uniform Resource Identifier. A standardized way of referring to a resource such as a file on your computer, a world wide web address, an email address, etc.... Internet Keywords make it easier for you to use well known names such as brand names, celebrities names, etc. For example, instead of typing http://www.kde.org/, you can just type KDE, or even K Desktop Environment. The name you type will be resolved to a URI, and you will be redirected to the appropriate location. Web shortcuts, on the other hand, let you come up with new pseudo URL schemes, or shortcuts, that basically let you parameterize commonly used URIs. For example, if you like the Google search engine, you can configure KDE so that a pseudo URL scheme like gg will trigger a search on Google. This way, typing gg:my query will search for my query on Google. One can see why we call these pseudo URL schemes. They are used like a URL scheme, but the input is not properly URL encoded, so one will type google:kde apps and not google:kde+apps. You can use Internet Keywords in &kde; in interactive navigation applications like Konqueror. You can use web shortcuts wherever you would normally use URIs. Shortcuts for several search engines should already be configured on your system, but you can add new keywords, and change or delete existing ones in the enhanced browsing control module. There is a single tab in this control module. The title of the tab is Keywords. This tab features two main boxes, one for Internet Keywords and one for web shortcuts. The top of the dialog has a checkbox labeled Enable Internet Keywords. If this option is selected, you can use Internet Keywords in KDE. Also at the top of the dialog, there is a dropdown list of all the known web shortcuts, which is labeled Search Fallback. You can either select one of the shortcuts from the list or leave it at None. If you select a web shortcut here, whenever you type something that is not an Internet Keyword, your input will be passed to the selected web shortcut. This provides a very pleasant navigation and search experience, where Internet Keywords provide direct navigation, and you are in control of how to search for information when the Internet Keywords database does not contain the name you type. (If you select None then a directory listing of relevant Internet Keywords is provided instead.) Also, if you type something that starts with a question mark, as in ? KDE, your input is directly passed to the web shortcut after stripping the question mark off, bypassing Internet Keywords entirely. This is useful when you really intend to do a search on your favorite search engine. The descriptive names of defined web shortcuts are shown in a listbox. You may have to use the horizontal scrollbar and move to the right side of the list to see the actual keywords associated with the descriptive names. As with other lists in KDE, you can click on a column heading to toggle the sort order between ascending and descending. If you click on a specific entry in the list of defined search providers, the details for that entry are shown in text boxes which are located immediately to the right of the list. In addition to the descriptive name for the item, you can also see the URI which is used, as well as the associated shortcuts which you can type anywhere in &kde; where URIs are expected. A given search provider can have multiple shortcuts, separated by a comma. The text boxes are used not only for displaying information about an item in the list of web shortcuts, but also for modifying or adding new items. Notice that there are two buttons below the text boxes. Initially, these buttons have the captions Change and Delete, and the first of these buttons is disabled. Clicking the Delete button has the expected effect of removing the currently selected item from the list of web shortcuts. If you change the contents of either the Search URI or the URI Shortcuts text box, the button labeled Change will be enabled so that you may save the changes you have made. On the other hand, if you change the contents of the Search Provider Name text box, the Change button will be replaced by an Add button so that you may create a new entry in the list of web shortcuts. If you examine the contents of the Search URI text box, you will find that most, if not all of the entries have a \1 in them. This sequence of two characters acts as a parameter, which is to say that they are replaced by whatever you happen to type after the colon character that is between a shortcut and its parameter. Let's consider some examples to clarify this idea. Suppose that the URI is http://www.google.com/search?q=\1, and gg is a shortcut to this URI. Then, typing gg:alpha is equivalent to http://www.google.com/search?q=alpha. You could type anything after the : character; whatever you have typed simply replaces the \1 characters, after being converted to the appropriate character set for the search provider and then properly URL-encoded. Only the \1 part of the search URI is touched, the rest of it is supposed to be properly URL-encoded already and is left as is. You can also have shortcuts without parameters. Suppose the URI was file:/home/me/mydocs/kofficefiles/kword and the shortcut was mykword. Then, typing mykword: is the same as typing the complete URI. Note that there is nothing after the colon when typing the shortcut, but the colon is still required in order for the shortcut to be recognized as such. By now, you will have understood that even though these shortcuts are called web shortcuts, they really are shortcuts to parameterized URIs, which can point not only to web sites like search engines but also to anything else that can be pointed to by a URI. Web shortcuts are a very powerful feature of navigation in KDE. This section written by Krishna Tateneni tateneni@pluto.njcc.com and Yves Arrouye yves@realnames.com