protocol handling spec?

[Dave Cridland]

On Mon Aug  9 10:25:28 2004, Lars Hallberg wrote:
> As a user, i want the protocol to matter for witch app to start. 
> Probably it's enuf for me to be able to say - for this protocol, 
> *always* use this app.
> 
> 
Yes, the scheme can be the only thing to look at. 'telnet' and 
'mailto', for instance, are likely to always start the same 
application.

'http', 'file', and 'imap' needn't, though - 'file' for the 
'localhost' case is very unlikely to do so, in particular.

So I agree it's useful to be able to specify that, but I disagree 
that this is all that's needed.

> For exampel, I want gqview to start for jpeg images genaraly, but 
> if it's a http uri I want firefox to start, so I esaly can brows 
> related pages. I want firwfox even if it is a mediatype firefox 
> don't handel internaly, just to get the dialogbox asking me wheter 
> to download or start the 'normal' mimetype viewer! Becose all 
> viewer don't have a 'save as' facility, and some viewers freqvently 
> crach. If I download the file, I can try different viewers!

What if it's an http URI referencing a DAV folder, or a Subversion 
repository, though?

Certainly an HTTP client has to start somewhere, because otherwise we 
don't know anything about the resource, but I'm not convinced that 
the client must always be a web browser, nor indeed the final viewer.

URIs are vaguely like filenames, but the problem is that there are no 
generic actions to apply. You can't 'View' or 'Edit' a mailto scheme 
URI, for instance, and schemes such as 'imap' have two very different 
modes of access, since they can refer to a server, folder, or search 
(which are not file-like, and hence require an MUA), or a message or 
section (which are, and could be launched using a suitable viewer for 
the part).

Dave.