[racket-dev] [racket] ActiveX support

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Wed Sep 5 08:14:50 EDT 2012

On Saturday, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> At Sat, 1 Sep 2012 18:40:20 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> > 
> > If this avoids constructing a temporary file, could we use it on
> > Windows for the documentation search?
> 
> The example starts IE specifically, as opposed to the user's default
> browser, so I don't think it can be an immediate replacement for the
> current browser launch.

More than that -- the reason for the temporary file is dropping part
of a "file://" url (the fragment, IIRC), which apparently happens at a
low enough level that several different things that I tried all failed
in the same way.  So my guess is that the above would still not
work...

And to clarify the reason for the temporary file: since the part of
the URL is dropped, the hack is to construct a temporary "trampoline"
file that has a redirection to the real URL, and that looks like the
only robust solution that actually worked fine in all cases.  There's
obviously no way to know when the browser actually came up and jumped
to the destination page, which is why these files are left behind,
with an occasional (`random'ly chosen) cleanup of files that look
sufficiently old.  (And BTW, it looks like the gnome browser starter
thing is doing the same thing, which would make the same hack useful
there too.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!

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