RE: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land

I don't follow. What is the cross platform way for a website owner to create a "control" that knows how to launch arbitrary aggregators on the client machine and subscribe to a feed. The analogy to this scenario is the mailto: URI scheme. How would you use a GUI control with event logic to replace it's traditional behavior when clicked by users on the WWW? 
 
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From: www-tag-request@w3.org on behalf of Bullard, Claude L (Len)
Sent: Fri 12/5/2003 1:27 PM
To: 'Tim Bray'; 'www-tag@w3.org'
Subject: RE: New URI scheme talk in RSS-land




Doesn't that conflate the role of the URI as an
identifier and its role as a data value to a
control?  Couldn't they do this by implementing
a GUI control with event logic?  Why should
browser vendors implement yetAnotherURIasClickEvent?

len


From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]

RSS feeds are ordinary web resources and have ordinary URIs.  For
example: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.rss is one, and as the
scheme suggests, is typically fetched via HTTP and there's lots of
scope for caching and all the usual helpful HTTP machinery.  However,
there's a lot of talk in the RSS community recently about wanting a new
URI scheme, e.g. feed://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.rss.  The reason
is that they want to be able to click on one of these things and wake
up the RSS client to read it and potentially subscribe.  You really
can't do this with MIME types because the RSS client doesn't need the
representation, it needs the URI.

Once you've got a new scheme, in popular operating systems it's
straightforward to cause them to be handed to an app of your choice
when clicked on.

In general it seems nuts to create a new scheme for URIs that describe
ordinary HTTP-accessible web resources, but I don't see any other
obviously-good solutions.

Received on Friday, 5 December 2003 16:35:28 UTC