Are URI schemas a dying art?

Posted on 28. Jun, 2007 by Daniel Aleksandersen in Web Development

Uniform Resource Identifier schemas describe resources. Why then are some of the the most 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 Responses to “Are URI schemas a dying art?”

  1. Abdul Qabiz

    29. Jun, 2007

    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

  2. Daniel Aleksandersen

    29. Jun, 2007

    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:.

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