<othercredit role="translator"><firstname>John</firstname><surname>Knight</surname><affiliation><address><email>anarchist_tomato@herzeleid.net</email></address></affiliation><contrib>Conversion to British English</contrib></othercredit>
<para>&konqueror; offers some features to enhance your browsing experience. One such feature is <emphasis>Web Shortcuts</emphasis>.</para>
<para>You may already have noticed that &kde; is very Internet friendly. For example, you can click on the <guimenuitem>Run</guimenuitem> menu item or type the keyboard shortcut assigned to that command (<keycombo action="simul"><keycap>Alt</keycap><keycap>F2</keycap></keycombo>, unless you have changed it) and type in a <acronym>URI</acronym>. <footnote><para>Uniform Resource Identifier. A standard way of referring to a resource such as a file on your computer, a World Wide Web address, an email address, <abbrev>etc...</abbrev>.</para></footnote></para>
<para>Web shortcuts, on the other hand, let you come up with new pseudo <acronym>URL</acronym> schemes, or shortcuts, that basically let you <emphasis>parameterise</emphasis> commonly used <acronym>URI</acronym>s. For example, if you like the Google search engine, you can configure KDE so that a pseudo <acronym>URL</acronym> scheme like <emphasis>gg</emphasis> will trigger a search on Google. This way, typing <userinput>gg:<replaceable>my query</replaceable></userinput> will search for <replaceable>my query</replaceable> on Google.</para>
<note><para>One can see why we call these pseudo <acronym>URL</acronym> schemes. They are used like a <acronym>URL</acronym> scheme, but the input is not properly <acronym>URL</acronym> encoded, so one will type <userinput>google:kde apps</userinput> and not <userinput>google:kde+apps</userinput>.</para></note>
<para>You can use web shortcuts wherever you would normally use <acronym>URI</acronym>s. Shortcuts for several search engines should already be configured on your system, but you can add new keywords and change or delete existing ones in the enhanced browsing control module. </para>
<para>There is a single tab in this control module. The title of the tab is <guilabel>Keywords</guilabel>. This tab features two main boxes, one for Internet Keywords and one for web shortcuts.</para>
<para>The descriptive names of defined web shortcuts are shown in a listbox. As with other lists in &kde;, you can click on a column heading to toggle the sort order between ascending and descending, and you can resize the columns.</para>
<para>If you double-click on a specific entry in the list of defined search providers, the details for that entry are shown in a popup dialogue. In addition to the descriptive name for the item, you can also see the <acronym>URI</acronym> which is used, as well as the associated shortcuts which you can type anywhere in &kde; where <acronym>URI</acronym>s are expected. A given search provider can have multiple shortcuts, each separated by a comma.</para>
<para>The text boxes are used not only for displaying information about an item in the list of web shortcuts, but also for modifying or adding new items.</para>
<para>You can change the contents of either the <guilabel>Search URI</guilabel> or the <guilabel>URI Shortcuts</guilabel> text box. Click <guibutton>OK</guibutton> to save your changes or <guibutton>Cancel</guibutton> to exit the dialogue with no changes.</para>
<para>If you examine the contents of the <guilabel>Search URI</guilabel> text box, you will find that most, if not all of the entries have a <option>\{@}</option> in them. This sequence of two characters acts as a parameter, which is to say that they are replaced by whatever you happen to type after the colon character that is between a shortcut and its parameter. Let's consider some examples to clarify this idea.</para>
<para>Suppose that the <acronym>URI</acronym> is <userinput>http://www.google.com/search?q=\{@}</userinput>, and <userinput>gg</userinput> is a shortcut to this <acronym>URI</acronym>. Then, typing <userinput>gg:<replaceable>alpha</replaceable></userinput> is equivalent to <userinput>http://www.google.com/search?q=<replaceable>alpha</replaceable></userinput>. You could type anything after the <userinput>:</userinput> character; whatever you have typed simply replaces the <option>\{@}</option> characters, after being converted to the appropriate character set for the search provider and then properly <acronym>URL</acronym>-encoded. Only the <option>\{@}</option> part of the search <acronym>URI</acronym> is touched, the rest of it is supposed to be properly <acronym>URL</acronym>-encoded already and is left as is.</para>
<para>You can also have shortcuts without parameters. Suppose the <acronym>URI</acronym> was <emphasis>file:/home/me/mydocs/kofficefiles/kword</emphasis> and the shortcut was <emphasis>mykword</emphasis>. Then, typing <userinput>mykword:</userinput> is the same as typing the complete <acronym>URI</acronym>. Note that there is nothing after the colon when typing the shortcut, but the colon is still required in order for the shortcut to be recognised as such.</para>
<para>By now, you will have understood that even though these shortcuts are called web shortcuts, they really are shortcuts to parameterised <acronym>URI</acronym>s, which can point not only to web sites like search engines but also to anything else that can be pointed to by a <acronym>URI</acronym>. Web shortcuts are a very powerful feature of navigation in &kde;.</para>
