- From: ZB Lucas <zblucas@semaphore.com>
- Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 17:34:06 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Daniel LaLiberte <liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu>
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
> Browsers should allow users to specify proxies that handle specific
> URI schemes, possibly new schemes. Netscape, for one, still assumes
> that any URI with a scheme it does not know about is a relative
> URL, and it has no way to specify proxies to handle specific new
> schemes. Mosaic for X has fixed these problems, partly at my
> insistence.
right now the win95 shell supports any sort of URL protocol. if you do a
ShellExec on a valid URL, the shell will look in the registry for a
handler of that protocol. and then pass it off to them. both NS2.0 and
MSIE take advantage of this. it also permits apps to register themselves
as handlers for a MIME type.
this means that a user can go to the start-run menu and enter
"http://www.home.com" and clik OK and it will activate the correct app
and display the desired page.
MSIE is smart enough that whenever it runs across a protocol that it
doesnt recognize, it always does a shellexec to see if anybody on the
system knows how to handle it.
so if someone wanted to, they could easily implement a link like
"mud:bestmud.com:8080" in a web page and if someone were running MSIE on
win95 it would passed off to the mud client. i believe there is even an
option to pass the URL with or without the protocol prefixed.
{zeke}
Received on Thursday, 11 April 1996 20:37:18 UTC