External data converters (these have been used by chimera since Nov. 1993)
External protocol handlers (added a few weeks ago)
For example, chimera doesn't support NNTP directly. A friend of mine
wrote a perl script that talks to an NNTP server and returns the
result as HTML. HTTP (simple and it is already in chimera)
is used by chimera and the protocol program to exchange information.
He wrote code to deal with finger URLs in about 5 minutes without
changing chimera.
It doesn't allow forms data to be passed to the protocol programs
but that capability should be pretty easy to add.
The external data converters allow chimera to use Postscript, JPEG, or
whatever else you want as inline images. The external converters
are also used to do decompression and uudecoding of documents and
to do other types of conversions.
The beta version of chimera that supports the above features is available
for anonymous ftp at:
ftp://ftp.cs.unlv.edu/pub/chimera-misc/xc16-1.60.tar.gz
The chimera home page is
-john