TERMIUM and Fluid

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Language, Macintosh
December 5th, 2008 • 9:58 am

I have an update regarding the problem I wrote about yesterday, where building a site-specific browser for the TERMIUM database with Fluid would yield an unusable application, in which submitting a form would systematically cause Mac OS X to switch back to Safari.

Well, thanks to the suggestion of a reader, I now have a solution for this problem that does not involve switching to Prism as the tool for building the site-specific browser.

The only thing that needs to be done, once the site-specific browser has been built with Fluid and launched, is to go to its preferences dialog box, navigate to the “Advanced” pane, and check the option labelled “Allow browsing to any URL”:

Option for TERMIUM

This option is enough to enable the Fluid-based site-specific browser for the new TERMIUM site to function properly, i.e. without form submissions causing Mac OS X to switch back to Safari.

The reason for this is fairly simple: while the new TERMIUM site operates much like the previous one, there is a more significant difference between the URL of the login page and the URL of the subsequent pages once you are logged in.

When building a site-specific browser, Fluid examines the URL of the site and tries to build a “pattern” that will be used, by default, to restrict browsing to that particular site. But because of the form of the initial URL for the site (for the login page) differs significantly from the form of the URL of the pages once you are logged in, the pattern that Fluid builds by default is too restrictive, and that is why URL requests that don’t match the pattern cause Fluid to open the URL in Safari instead.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to allow browsing to any URL, you can also change the pattern that Fluid uses to restrict browsing to something simpler, like this:

Option 2 for TERMIUM

The * symbol obviously is a wildcard that allows any number of occurrences of any character. With this revised pattern, all the URLs generated by submitting TERMIUM forms will match the criterion and browsing will continue to take place within the same window in the Fluid-based site-specific browser.

Problem solved!

The solution with Prism remains a viable alternative as well, of course, but, as noted yesterday, Prism uses the Mozilla rendering engine, with generic, Windows-like controls, and also has fewer options and a less Mac-friendly interface.

So I am glad that I am able to return to Fluid after all.

Thanks to Jean-Christophe!


One Response to “TERMIUM and Fluid”

  1. Betalogue » Stand-alone TERMIUM browser and Keyboard Maestro says:

    […] few years ago, I wrote about using the Fluid utility to build a stand-alone browser (based on Safari) for the TERMIUM on-line terminology […]