Re: Proposal: External Protocol Handling

Hi!

I think the biggest difference is that web intents work between web pages,
whereas this is used to launch installed programs on the user’s computer.

Think about this use case: A web page with a list of ssh hosts. When you
click on a link, the JS on the page calls
navigator.launchUri(“ssh://hostname”) to try to launch your SSH agent. If
a handler for the “ssh://“ protocol is installed, it presents the user
with a dialog window to ask whether they want to launch their SSH client
(e.g. “PuTTY" on Windows, ssh in a terminal on Mac, Unix*).

If the user accepts, the SSH client is launched and the JS successCallback
is executed; 
If the user rejects or no SSH client is registered, the SSH client is not
launched and the noHandlerCallback is executed.

Currently, one can do that using a plain link or an iframe - however the
user experience is pretty bad if e.g. no protocol handler client is
installed (depending on the browser). Each browser has different gotchas
and limitations that we currently need to work around.

We would like to have a stable, well-defined API for this that also allows
to handle the “user declined / protocol handler is not installed” case
gracefully. As an example, the web page could show a UI to tell the user
how to install an SSH client.

Cheers,
Kosta

PS: Sorry for the long signature...
-- 
Konstantin Welke
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On Monday, March 31, 2014 at 3:04 PM, James Greene
<james.m.greene@gmail.com> wrote:

Would this be similar to the Web Intents spec proposal that Google was
championing (based on Android Intents)?

Sincerely,
    James Greene

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Ben Johnson
<Ben.Johnson@citrix.com> wrote:

Hi all,
 
I’ve been working on a draft specification for a creating a dedicated
cross-browser external protocol launching standard based on the behavior
of msLaunchUri in Internet Explorer.
 
The draft is here: 
http://bengjohnson.github.io/ExternalProtocolSpecification.html

<http://bengjohnson.github.io/ExternalProtocolSpecification.html>
 
I’m looking for feedback from the web app group members on:
 
·        
What major concerns to you have with the overall approach?
o  
Do you feel there are insufficient motivating factors for a change to be
made?
o  
Are there unstated concerns missing from the document?
·        
What level of detail are you expecting for a complete proposal?
·        
Should it be better aligned with web-based protocol handling? If so, how?
·        
And of course, any particular issues with the document in its current form.
 
Thanks,
Ben

Received on Monday, 31 March 2014 16:52:05 UTC