Are URI schemas a dying art?
Words by Daniel Aleksandersen on 2007-06-28
Uniform Resource Identifier schemas describe resources. Why then are some of the themost popular URIs schemas named as actions?
mailto: is an action, whilst email: is a resource. The first is the standard and widely supported, and the second is not the standard and is not supported by a single application.
Another example:
tel: is a resource, whilst callto: is an action. The second is supported by Skype (a popular calling software) but is not a standard, and the first is the standard but not supported by a single application.
To me it looks like calling users to actions is more important than pointing out the appropriate resource. Which is not the point of an URI.
Am I missing something here? Where did it all go wrong?..
2 comments
It seems, applications are not taking care of standard. And applications tend to come up with their own scheme to make sure application is launched always.
If I install three different VOIP softwares, assuming all of them work with tel:// scheme. What should be the user interaction to launch application? Should user be presented three options to choose any one?
Current pattern is to associate tel:// with any one application, that is what happens in case of mailto:// or file://
I think, to avoid the above scenario applications come up with non-standard things.. Which makes sense in some cases..
I would love to see a better user-interaction and standard way.
-abdul
Abdul Qabiz (Subscribed) at 2007-06-29 @952.
My point with this article where that URI schemas should describe resources and not actions. Such as email: instead of mailto:. The schema naming is the main problem here.
If you use KDE for Linux you can choose system wide default applications. Mac OS allows for something similar. This might be a little more difficult under Windows (as so much else).
For your example you would have chosen one default voip application (like Skype) that should handle telephone resources such as tel: and sms:.
Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-06-29 @086.
Leave your comment