IEHelpers plug-in :: WSIE – Web Shortcuts

Documentation for release 0.7b [2003.09.12]

Welcome to the WSIE documentation page.

• Introduction
• Installing / Uninstalling WSIE
  • Upgrading?
  • Helper scripts
• WSIE and you
  • Home pages
  • User feedback and technical support
• User's guide
  • Using Web Shortcuts
  • Configuring shortcuts
  • Search URI expansion syntax reference
• Available shortcuts
• Upcoming attractions

Introduction

WSIE is part of the IEHelpers project, an OSI-certified Open Source project that provides free plug-ins for enhancing the browsing experience with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

WSIE provides you with a very neat feature taken straight from the Konqueror browser: Web Shortcuts.

Web Shortcuts empower users to access their common Web queries in a few keystrokes. While originally designed for search engine queries (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Altavista), it expanded into a full-fledged URI expansion mechanism, with common targets such as bug tracking systems, language reference manuals, reference databases (e.g. IMDb, IETF), dictionaries, news sites, and more!

Of course, the shortcuts are fully customizable, using a dialog box available right from Internet Explorer's menu bar.

Installing / Uninstalling WSIE

WSIE comes as a DLL containing various COM objects. It also relies on a WSIEPlugin.ini file to store shortcuts.

Installation is fairly straightforward.

PLEASE NOTE: this section does not cover compiling the source code archive. Developers downloading the source are assumed to be competent enough to know how to proceed. This section focuses on the binaries archive file.

Once you've downloaded the binaries file (WSIE-version-Binaries.zip), unzip it wherever you please. We advise you create a specific directory, such as C:\Program Files\IEHelpers\WSIE, so as to easily find the plug-in on your disk, and provide a central place for later IEHelpers plug-ins to be installed in a consistent fashion.

Upgrading?

If you are upgrading from a former version, just to be sure, start by closing any Internet Explorer window, along with any application that makes use of Internet Explorer's WebBrowser control to display HTML contents (e.g. Outlook Express, Outlook, eDonkey2000, NewzCrawler). When no more WebBrowser control is active, you can safely replace your former WSIEPlugin.dll file with its new version.

It is best to unzip where you had previously unzipped your earlier version of the plug-in, so as not to end up with multiple versions of WSIE on your disk. In such a case, you may encounter an error message displayed by your unzipping program, stating the WSIEPlugin.dll file could not be deflated. This usually means that the DLL is still in use by some running program that leverages Internet Explorer technology. Close programs you suspect may do so, and retry unzipping.

At any rate, you can unzip your new version in a new place. You will then need to register this new version, in order for Internet Explorer to know where the more recent DLL file is located. Failing to register the new plug-in if it was installed in a different directory than the former one will make Internet Explorer oblivious to this new plug-in.

Helper scripts

WSIE provides three script files designed to help you install, upgrade or uninstall the plug-in.

• install.bat : run this on first installation, or when you want to use the latest reference shortcuts file as is. This script basically calls register.bat and attempts to overwrite your own shortcuts file with the reference one. If you customized your shortcuts list, this is a bad idea.
• register.bat : run this when the plug-in changes directory, either because you manually moved it, or installed an upgrade in a directory different from your existing version's. This merely lets Internet Explorer know of the plug-in's location.
• unreg.bat : unregisters the plug-in. Later launches of Internet Explorer will stop using it. Your shortcuts file remains untouched.

WSIE and you

This section is about how you can get further information on WSIE and IEHelpers, and otherwise interact with the project.

Home pages

• IEHelpers homepage: iehelpers.sourceforge.net
• IEHelpers SF.NET page
• WSIE homepage
• IEHelpers downloads page

User feedback and technical support

• Encountering bugs? Please report them here (first check they're not reported yet!)
• Ideas for enhancing WSIE or for a new IEHelpers plug-in? Let us know here (idem)
• Something wrong? Needing support? Just ask us.

User's guide

This section explains how to use the Web Shortcuts feature, and how to configure them by adding, tailoring or removing definitions.

Using Web Shortcuts

Using a Web Shortcut is trivial (otherwise that wouldn't make much of shortcut, would it?). Access your location bar, then type (one of) the shortcut's key(s), followed by a colon (:) and the shortcut parameter(s):

Then just hit the Return key to browse, as you normally would. WSIE fires up to analyze your URI. When finding a match among the keys of available shortcuts, it expands your URI accordingly and resets the browsing towards the expansion:

Note: since the events WSIE can hook on pertain only to actual browsing requests, the shortcuts are—unfortunately—not available in the Run... command (Ctrl+R, Start | Run...). However, IEHelpers focus on enhancing the Internet Explorer experience from a user standpoint, so we deem this shortcoming highly acceptable.

Configuring shortcuts

WSIE registers a new menu item in Internet Explorer's Tools menu, captioned Configure Web Shortcuts:

Its hotkey is N, so if you are keyboard-enclined, you can access it quickly through the Alt key for the Tools menu, then the N key.

Clicking this menu item opens the configuration dialog:

This dialog contains a list of all available shortcuts, by alphabetical order of name. On the right-hand column, a list of the keys for each shortcut is displayed. You do not need to enlarge the column to view all shortcuts; should the list be too long for display, simply hover the cursor over it: a popup will appear to show the complete list.

The Add, Change and Remove buttons are also accessible through the intuitive Insert, Return and Delete keys, in addition to their hotkeys.

Multiple shortcuts can be selected for mass removal through traditional multi-select means. In such a situation, WSIE will display a confirmation dialog for each shortcut, with All and Cancel buttons in addition to the customary Yes and No. The Cancel button will stop enumerating selected shortcuts for deletion, while the All button will forgo further confirmation and mass-remove all pending selected shortcuts.

Important: Your changes are cancellable at any time, and only through clicking the Apply button do you commit your settings to the plug-in and .INI file persistency.

Note: the system menu for the dialog features a « About... » option that displays a small information message box.

Clicking the Add or Change button opens the shortcut dialog:

• The Shortcut name field contains the displayed name for your shortcut. It has to be unique, and dialog validation will enforce this.
• The Search URI field contains the URI expansion for your shortcut. Konqueror's full-fledged syntax is implemented as of release 0.7.
• The URI Shortcut(s) field contains a comma-separated list (no spaces) of keys you want to map to this shortcut. Each key must be unique throughout WSIE, and dialog validation will enforce this.

Search URI expansion syntax reference

As of release 0.7, WSIE supports the whole syntax defined by Konqueror. Here is a reference for it, which we hope will be more comprehensive than the help tooltip in Konqueror!

Every expansion must be enclosed within the following two delimiter sequences: \{ (backslash, left curly brace) and } (right curly brace).

To understand the description below, you must know that what you type after the shortcut, on the address bar, is split into "elements." The splitting uses spaces and ampersands (&) as delimiters. Name=value pairs are distinguished from other text elements in several syntaxes.

An expansion can have one of the following syntaxes:

These examples should help clarify those definitions:

Simple syntax
Search URI is: http://www.google.com/search?q=\{@}&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
User types: gg:iehelpers some_name=some_value
Expanded URI is: http://www.google.com/search?q=iehelpers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Notice the name/value pair was not used.

Positional syntax
Search URI is: http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/\{1}.html
User types: db:acronym
Expanded URI is: http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/acronym.html

Positional/sequence syntax
Search URI is: http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=\{mode,2,"dist"}&query=\{query,q,1}
User types: cpan:browser
Expanded URI is: http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=dist&query=browser
Notice the first expansion defaulted out to its literal text because there was neither a mode-named pair, nor a second text element.

Extensive sequence syntax
Search URI is: http://www.google.com/search?as_q=\{all,@}&num=\{num,"10"}&as_epq=\{exact,""}&as_sitesearch=\{site}&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
User types: ggx:iehelpers site=tddsworld.com num=25
Expanded URI is: http://www.google.com/search?as_q=iehelpers&num=25&as_epq=&as_sitesearch=tddsworld.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Available shortcuts

Herebelow is a list of all shortcuts available by default as of the current release (0.7b).

Disclaimer: the presence of a given site in the default Web Shortcuts does not mean IEHelpers endorses it in any way. IEHelpers shall in no way be held liable for any undesired consequence of relying on such a site's contents. Most of the default shortcuts come straight from Konqueror's default set. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a given site is the best for its purpose range.

Upcoming attractions

There are plans to completely refit the configuration dialog, towards some more effective, more ergonomic design.

Also, a merging functionality will allow users to merge any or all of the default shortcuts into their own shortcut lists, without erasing their customized settings.

© 2003 Christophe Porteneuve — Last update: September 15, 2003 @ 11:08am GMT+2.