Default browser setting

[Rodney Dawes]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 05:44, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 04:17:34PM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 12:48, David Faure wrote:
> [...]
> > > See the "mimetype standard" spec, and the proposed
> > > "mime-type/application mapping spec, being discussed roughly 2 weeks
> > > ago". Once those two specs are implemented in most desktops, finding
> > > what's the "preferred browser" is only a matter of looking up
> > > the preferred application for text/html.
> > 
> > That doesn't seem right.  The "preferred browser" shouldn't be bound to
> > the mime type.
> 
> The correct MIME type would be 'text/x-uri' if you don't know what the
> resource's type is. ie, you're looking for an application that will handle
> the URI, rather than the thing it points to.

Regardless of it's correctness, it is too generalized for the purposes
of this thread. We shouldn't be opening mailto, ftp, gopher, http,
archie (does anyone still use that?), and god knows what else, all with
a single application, based on the simple fact that they are URIs.
Trying to look for an RFC or something, I stumbled upon several mails on
the www-lib list on w3c, that mention "text/x-url-http". This may be
more correct than whatever my previous suggestion was, but we probably
surely want to be able to use whatever Windows does also, however
incorrect that my be, because people on Windows, still use Windows
software, particularly Outlook, which will probably list things like
these somewhere at some point.

-- dobey