[webkit-dev] Support "registerProtocolHandler" in WebKit2

[Maciej Stachowiak]

> On May 21, 2015, at 7:38 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at annevk.nl> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 1:25 AM, Anders Carlsson <andersca at apple.com> wrote:
>> Sam Weinig 2015-05-15 10:12:54 PDT:
>>> Support for navigator.registerProtocolHandler/unregisterProtocolHandler is not something we want to support in WebKit2 at this time as we are not confident it is a good Web API. This might be a good conversation for webkit-dev.
>> 
>> I agree with Sam.
> 
> So what else should web-based email or IRC clients or some such use to
> integrate with sites that offer mailto and irc URLs? Especially for
> email it seems like a worthwhile thing to solve. And that there's no
> cross-browser way to do it in 2015 is somewhat of a shame.

I think it’s useful to have an API for the "mailto" use case. A lot of people use webmail as their default mail client, and it seems nice to make mailto: links do the right thing for them. We do allow changing the default Mail reader to a native app, at least on Mac. I would almost consider having navigator.registerProtocolHandler just for that use case.

On the face of it, the registerProtocolHandler API seems more general than necessary, but the actual spec for it has a whitelist of specific schemes, most of which seem reasonable for this kind of purpose: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#custom-handlers <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#custom-handlers>

I am curious what Sam and Anders dislike about this API, and whether it might be something we’d want to support at least with a more restricted set of schemes.

(I am more dubious of the content handler aspect.)

Regards,
Maciej

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