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From: "Tomasz J. Cholewo" <tjchol01@mecca.spd.louisville.edu>
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Subject: webster-w3.el

Hi,

I would love to be proven wrong but I think that the last public webster
server citi.umich.edu was shut down recently because of copyright
problems.  This way the packages webster.el and webster-ucb.el are now
of interest only to people having access to restricted (usually
on-campus) webster servers.

Merriam-Webster Inc. (TM) has set up a web page with a search form
allowing for looking words up using WWW.  I wrote a really short
function which constructs a query in a manner similar to the old
`webster' function and displays the results in a W3 buffer.  (It was
twice as long before I noticed that their server supports GET in
addition to POST request.)

Tom

P.S. M-W Inc. home page says: ``Would you like to link to one of the
Merriam-Webster pages on this site?  Write to our Permissions
Department.''  I hope that this function does not "violate" their
copyright as it is a form of a bookmark, not a link.

=============== CUT HERE ===================
;;; webster-w3.el
(defun webster-w3 (arg)
"Look up a word in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (TM)
at http://www.m-w.com using W3."
  (interactive (list
		(let ((prompt (concat "Look up word in webster ("
				      (current-word) "): ")))
		     (read-string prompt))))
  (require 'w3)
  (require 'w3-forms)
  (require 'url)
  (if (equal "" arg) (setq arg (current-word)))
  (w3-fetch (concat 
	     "http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mweb?book=Dictionary&va=" 
	     (w3-form-encode-xwfu arg))))

(provide 'webster-w3)

