protocol handling spec?
Dave Cridland
dave at cridland.net
Mon Aug 9 13:02:02 EEST 2004
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.
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