Re: fb: URIs?

> > These URLs were never designed to be used, or useful, outside of the 
iPhone.

Right, but I presume that if someone else where to register fb: and use 
fb: URLs for some other purpose, the phone might confused about the new 
ones.  It seems to me that even uses within a limited community tend to 
cause these shorts of effects, and therefore should be discouraged.  I do 
agree that, once someone has implemented a feature like this on a device, 
it's hard to blame applications for using it.

Noah

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
Sent by: uri-request@w3.org
02/16/2010 04:39 PM
 
        To:     uri@w3.org
        cc:     David Recordon <davidrecordon@facebook.com>, (bcc: Noah 
Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        Re: fb: URIs?


On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Daniel R. Tobias <dan@tobias.name> wrote:
> I just noticed that the iPhone Facebook app, when you enable its
> recently-added feature to sync your Facebook friends with your iPhone
> contacts, inserts URIs for each person of the form:
>
> fb://profile/771025267
>
> When you click on such a URI from the iPhone contact section, it
> brings up the person's Facebook info via the Facebook app.
>
> I presume this is a nonstandard, unregistered URI scheme; has any
> attempt been made to register it?
>
> It also appears to abuse the double slash, since what follows doesn't
> seem to be any sort of "authority".
>
> When the contacts are further synced to other programs and systems (I
> have mine automatically syncing in quite a few directions to various
> things both on my PC and on the net), you end up with nonfunctional
> links in most of the places, as no programs that I know of outside
> the iPhone support this scheme; the "use HTTP for everything" crowd
> sometimes has a point.

I got in touch with David Recordon at Facebook (cc:'d). His response
copied below with permission.

Dan

> Hey Dan,
> Asked an engineer on our mobile team and here's what he said.
>
> --David
>
> > The origin of those URLs was entirely pragmatic. The iPhone app 
handles showing
> > different parts of its UI with an internal URL handler that deals with 
exactly these URLs.
> > When we developed the sync feature, it was natural to simply allow 
external callers to
> > direct "fb" URLs to the app, and use the same internal handling 
mechanism that had
> >  been there all along.
> >
> > These URLs were never designed to be used, or useful, outside of the 
iPhone.
> >
> > The app is actually capable of handling www URLs (so for example
> > "http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4" causes the same thing to 
happen as
> >  "fb://profile/4"), but we couldn't use those for the sync feature 
because there is no way
> >  to tell the system to direct just that specific set of http URLs to 
the app.
> >
> > Long story short, we (certainly I, anyway) have no intentions to make 
"fb" a real
> >  URL scheme. It just arose out of convenience.

Received on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 00:14:16 UTC