[whatwg] Proposal to extend registerProtocolHandler

Peter Kasting pkasting at google.com
Mon Jul 4 15:41:13 PDT 2011


In general, I echo Michael's comment that we follow the notifications model.

On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 1:01 PM, Nils Dagsson Moskopp <
nils at dieweltistgarnichtso.net> wrote:

> > Right now sites are actually much _more_ annoying without this
> > feature as they just blindly ask you to make them your protocol
> > handler every time.
>
> Can UAs not be expected to handle this properly, like they do with
> repeated alerts?


It's not a problem on the UA side, but the web page side.  Assume we want to
limit action on this call to cases where there's a user gesture (to prevent
bad sites from annoying you quite as easily, though I admit it is not a huge
roadblock).  Now you're Gmail and you want to give the user the ability to
register you as a mailto: handler.  So you whip up some button that will
make the rPH() call and some UI around it that calls attention to it.
 Without the ability to check if you're already the default handler, you
have to show this UI all the time, which is not at all appealing, or else
bury it somewhere, which means it will never get seen by most users.

PK



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