What: PRS Open Source Software
Where: http://www.prs.de/int/products/tcltkres/rtl/
http://www.prs.de/int/products/tcltkres/printerdll/ links broken at 20050830
Description: PRS has several Tcl/Tk downloadable items that are
open source and free to use. RTL is a runtime library
collection of often used complex widgets which reduces
the effort for developing sophisticated platform independant
applications. It includes a scrollable grid, input combobox,
multiple column listbox, spinbox widget, shell widget,
tree widget, and preferences widget.
printerdll is an extension to let you print the contents of
a Windows NT window.
Updated: 09/2001
Contact: mailto:[email protected] LV however, if you use the search engine at http://www.prs.de/ , you will find hits on RTL, including pointers to a download area. I suggest that in cases where people find broken links on a page, that if it is something you really want, just email the company and see if they have moved the item.
Another possibily is using that www archive site - do we have a reference to it here on the wiki?
escargo 30 Aug 2005 - I did not find pointers to a download area when I did a search at their site (at least, not for RTL specifically). I also found references to a VisualGIPSY GUI designer released as open source in 2000. We really ought to find a home for open source code that gets lost because the original developers abandon it (for whatever reason). (Of course, if too much bit rot sets in, it wouldn't be much good, but one can hope.) (Also, how do you tell what software is going to be abandoned before it's abandoned? Otherwise you have to save copies of everything.)
I have used the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/ to find some past pages, but I don't recall where I made the link.
Here's what the Wayback Machine found: http://web.archive.org/web/20030622100705/http://www.prs.de/int/products/tcltkres/rtl/
Interesting the page title is "VisualGIPSY: RunTime Library". The last date the page was recorded was October, 2004, but the copyright date on the page itself is 2000.
LV I'm surprised that the wayback machine doesn't change internal references to copies of the referenced pages that were there at the same time as the snapshot of the page. By that I mean when I go to the archive.org link above, the download area link still points at prs.de, and the page does not exist.
escargo 30 Aug 2005 - I think the reason that the Wayback Machine does not automatically update relative links is that it is not guessing which version of the link you want to follow. I agree though, it would make sense for it to automatically make the links relative to the current page.
escargo 31 Aug 2005 - Now that I think about it, this might be an interesting application for a specialized variation of Web scraping. Instead of recursive-mode wget (see minimalist wget for a start) that can copy and relocate an existing site, one could use the Wayback Machine to recursively fetch pages from a recorded site (which does not have relocated URLs). (As a default policy, I could see capturing the latest version of any page recorded.) That would make a dandy starkit for people trying to find old information on the web.