[Standards] use of XMPP protocols in HTML

[Brett Zamir]

Hi all,

My Firefox extension, Open URIs, at 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/162154/ , has just been 
approved by the Mozilla review team. You can read the description there, 
but essentially, the aim of the add-on is to gain enough adoption and 
experience for the HTML5 working group to be convinced that supporting 2 
new attributes on <a/> is merited.

One attribute is @uris, which offers a higher priority than @href, 
allowing browsers that do not support the attribute (or the protocol) to 
fall-back to the @href.

The other attribute is @alternateURIs which offers a potential trigger 
to browsers to highlight the element in such a way that the user may be 
aware that they can right-click these links to find alternative 
protocols (e.g., if Wikipedia linked to its own page for a given book by 
default, but offered the URN of the ISBN via right-click).

Given the XMPP community's interest in allowing web users the ability to 
click on link while avoiding it doing nothing, I think these attributes 
might be of interest. In any case, it won't hurt websites to offer 
default or alternative URIs with their XMPP (or other) links.

Just thought I'd welcome you all to add these attributes on your own 
pages, try out the extension in conjunction with it, and possibly voice 
your support in the HTML5 mailing list if you favor giving alternative 
protocols (or URNs) a leg up on HTTP links which are going to be the 
mainstay for some time, especially to the extent no attributes exist to 
facilitate transitioning to possible alternatives.

thanks!
Brett