auto-fetching layers

[Russell Nelson]

Hmmmm.....  Y'know, you could make Thuban *very* easy to use by
creating a MIME type mapping between thuban and .thuban.  If somebody
clicked on a .thuban session file, it would start up thuban with the
session file.  Of course, the session file would need to have URLs
instead of filenames.  Wouldn't it be trivially easy to put a URL
fetcher wrapper everywhere a filename is referenced?  That wrapper
would download the URL and put it in a cache, then return the cache
filename.

You'd also need a program which took a session file and a base URL,
then it would rewrite the session file with the URLs wherever
filenames were found.

In case you're wondering why I'm harping on usability, it's because I
want to go to my county government and tell them "Hey, there's this
free program called Thuban which will give any county citizen the
ability to display GIS files, if only we were publishing them."  I'll
have no crediability if Thuban causes people trouble.  They're
currently using some stupid for-pay service to give county taxpayers
access to the tax map.

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