Just to clarify a little, the specific advantage to XMPP would be that
websites could offer the XMPP protocol by default, while allowing a
fall-back to lead to either an explanatory HTTP page, or possibly, via
the javascript: protocol, giving an alert or JavaScript-based message to
indicate how the user could obtain support for the XMPP protocol.
Links that put you on the road to nowhere in browsers that do not
support the protocol do not exactly make for a user-friendly site (not
to mention experimentation in the first place).
Brett
On 7/2/2010 1:37 PM, Brett Zamir wrote:
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
