- From: Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com>
- Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 12:24:47 -0700
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: whatwg@whatwg.org
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Jul 2014, Adam Barth wrote:
>>
>> == Use Case ==
>>
>> A web site wants to launch an external protocol handler. For example,
>> a web site might want to launch PuTTY via the "ssh" scheme.
>
> window.open('ssh://...');
>
> I'll look at this in more detail in due course, but FWIW this appears to
> be more or less identical to a proposal from Microsoft about 18 months
> ago:
>
> https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=20799
>
> It's still not really clear what difference this API would have to
> window.open(), though.
The difference is that window.open opens a new browser window even if
the URL is handled by an external protocol handler. Even if we
changing current browsers to detect whether the URL will be handled by
an external protocol handler before opening the window, web sites
won't be able to feature-detect which browsers have this new behavior
and therefore won't be able to move away from iframe@src hacks until
all the browsers they care about have the behavior change. By
contrast, sites can feature detect navigator.launchURL and fall back
to iframe@src in UAs that lack the new API.
Adam
Received on Monday, 14 July 2014 19:25:48 UTC