Re: HTML5 proposes introduction of new family of URI schemes

On Jan 24, 2012, at 03:10 , Jonathan A Rees wrote:
> I was wondering - is the registered handler supposed to work with all
> applications, or just web browsers? For example, mail readers, PDF
> viewers, document and spreadsheet composers - anything that exposes
> actionable hyperlinks.

As far as I can tell the specification is silent on this. That being said, in order to be fully useful, this feature works best if it doesn't differentiate between native and Web registrations.

> If so then this is really an OS-level feature
> and I wonder what it's doing in an HTML specification.

That depends on where what you call the OS stops :) If the idea is that the Web *is* the OS then this makes sense.

> (Especially
> since browsers aren't the only containers for Javascript... right?)

That, or the fact that you have multiple browsers, don't matter. The registration binds to a given URL *through* a given browser. At the (lower-level) OS level, it just binds to the given browser, which then see what it's being opened with and routes to the right URL. You could have mailto bound to Opera and smsto bound to Firefox if you wanted to. If you have something that's not a browser but can execute these things, you could bind to that, too.

> Can general users tell the difference between a browser and the
> rest of their application software suite?

The idea is that the progressively shouldn't need to.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Tuesday, 24 January 2012 16:01:57 UTC