System and a process for specifying a location on a network

Abstract

When a user selects an arbitrary symbol (word, phrase, sentence, graphic, image, etc.) from an arbitrary application on a client computer , and copies this symbol to a clipboard , a linker , being a terminate-and-stay-resident-type process, automatically captures that symbol from the clipboard . Similarly, when a user types at a keyboard from an arbitrary application , those typed characters are first passed to an input method editor , where they are temporarily stored within a buffer , and when the user enters a prescribed “okay” key sequence the characters within that buffer are converted as necessary and passed to the application , but if the user enters a prescribed “link” key sequence, a character string determining component of the input method editor passes the characters within the buffer to a linker . In either case, the linker sends the captured symbol to a URL server . The URL server possesses a database , accumulated within which there are sets of symbols A, B, . . . and URLs A, B, . . . corresponding thereto, searches the database and retrieves therefrom a URL corresponding to the received symbol , and returns that retrieved URL to the linker . The linker launches a WWW browser and passes the URL received from the server to the WWW browser