Slug: webbased-url-handlers Date: 2010-07-18 Title: Web-based URL Handlers (or, Lessons from the iPhone) layout: post

While walking back from the Gilt Club tonight (meet-n-greet before FSW) to the hotel, I was chatting with Brion and Zach from Status.net and starting talking about a conceptual UI bug in status.net. The bug to me is that in order to subscribe to a user’s personal status.net site (say, I want to subscribe to Evan on his private instance) I need to enter my status.net identity on his site to get the ball rolling. Not that this is difficult, but it seems awkward and annoying.

Solution: Web sites should be able to register URL handlers with the browser. A site could define their own URL protocol string, and provide a callback that links with that protocol string would be sent to. This is a direct “port” of the same idea from iPhone interprocess communication, which was what got me thinking about it.

What if my status.net site could tell my browser:

  1. I can handle ostatus: URIs
  2. Send the link to http://me.status.net/subscribe?{url}

The browser could then pop up a dialog:

me.status.net would like to register to handle status: links. Would you like to use me.status.net to handle these links? [Okay] [No Thanks]

I could click to say yes, then when visiting some other user’s ostatus-implementing site, I could click the subscribe link (which looks like status:them.ostatus.com) and the browser would automatically take me to my selected status: handler site and let that site complete the process.

How would the handler site provide this information? One idea could be our friend the <link> tag in the site <head>:

<link rel="url-handler" type="ostatus" href="http://me.status.net/subscribe?{url}" />

Unfortunately, that looks a little janky to me and probably tromps all over the intended semantics of the tag. Perhaps something with <meta>? I’ll leave that up to the markup wizards.

We could also take this a step further: If my browser knows how to handle ostatus: URLs now, we could improve the UI some, perhaps, by having the browser parse the incoming page for a rel=status link, and give me a nice little [status] icon in the location bar?

Status_bar

Obviously that UI would get crowded kinda fast, but this could be done with a variety of services: like:, follow:, etc. – as long as the handler can be linked to a particular protocol or service.

Thoughts?

Edit on Github