Hi, On Nov 26, 2007 10:53 AM, Patrice Dumas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > Currently the mime information that allows to chose an application based > on the mimetypes it handles is part of the .desktop file. But another > item of an url that could be a criterium for application selection is the > protocol/scheme that appears in front of urls, like http, ftp or file. > So maybe it could be nice to add a new entry in the desktop entry, > called Protocol or Scheme, with a ; delimited list of protocols handled > by the application. >
This makes sense. I want to point out that there is a standardization effort underway regarding web applications / web services in WhatWG that relates to this. The HTML 5 draft defines two new javascript APIs that allows web sites to register web services as handlers for protocols and content. They are called registerProtocolHandler(), which takes a protocol and URI as argument, and registerContentHandler() which takes mime type and URI as argument. The URI is a web service that can handle the protocol or the mimetype. It corresponds to the command string or program in a desktop environment. Using these new APIs it will be possible to register that the mailto: protocol should be opened by GMail, for example. The new Firefox 3 beta have these APIs implemented, but so far I am not aware of any such web service to try it out on. You can read the draft description at http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#custom-handlers Also, there is an underlying assumption for certain protocols that the web browser should hand over the URL as-is to an application that understands it, rather than retrieve the contents of the URL and hand that over to the application. The webcal protocol is one example, see the following blog entry for a good description: http://larry.cannell.org/webcal It would be good if the browser and the desktop could share these settings, so xdg-open would act the same way for a mailto: URL as Firefox would. The first step to accomplish this would be to make sure that the semantics of protocol handler and content handler registration is similar. Claes _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
