Re: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

The inventions of new feed: (and Apples cal:) uri schemes and the
limitations of mime type based resource handling, show that there
is a big hole in web usability, waiting for a architecturally elegant
solution.

Fortunately, the "hole" is not in the lower layers of the web
architecture as the "feed" resource are still valid http resources and
carry, at least implicitly, a http uri.

The problem is not about hacking a browser as people would like
to include a "pointer" to the feed in their email as well (and yes, it
should work in the complete absence of html mails).

Noone is comfortable with the feed:/cal:/whateverisnext: mess and
something like xlink will not solve the mail problem either. A good
solution could be a meta uri reference scheme like
    use:type[:typespecificextnoatsign]@urireference

So one can write links like the following
   use:rss@http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.rss
or as href in a html page at www.tbray.org
   <a href="use:rss@/ongoing/ongoing.rss">subscribe</a>
or
   <a href="use:mime:text/xml@/ongoing/ongoing.rss">view rss source</a>
or
   <a href="use:webdav@http://greenbytes.de:81/wcm/docs">open 
webfolder</a>

Either browsers adopt the new meta scheme or one writes a single
application registered for "use:" uris which handles the forwarding
to all other apps.

The advantage of this approach over the feed:/cal:/whatever: uris
is that generic clients like wget can handle these uris with just
little changes as well.

Regards, Stefan

Am 06.12.2003 um 19:19 schrieb Tim Bray:

>
> On Dec 6, 2003, at 10:09 AM, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>
>> If we have a MIME type that always involves invoking a separate 
>> application when a user clicks on a feed how does one perform HTTP 
>> GETs on the feed to view the XML content in their browser then? So 
>> does this mean servers have to use separate MIME types for the same 
>> file or that the assumption is that no one will ever want to click on 
>> a feed and see the actual content in their web browser? Both seem 
>> like gross hacks to me.
>
> I suspect that anyone who really wants to see the XML source code is 
> probably capable of right-click-to-download or wget or some other way 
> around the problem.  -Tim