whatwg / whatwg/html

Fallback URI handlers on a webpage

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addition/proposal needs implementer interest topic: custom protocols
Dominant language
HTML
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Description

Let's say you have a mastodon and a website, and you wanna put mastodon links that open in the user's mastodon on your website. So you go on your website and sprinkle web+mastodon: around only to find out that browsers are user-hostile and drop the user into a very confusing error page.

It'd be nice to have a way to set all links on a website to fallback to a specific URI handler, so that it, for example, goes to your mastodon instance, or to a mastodon tutorial.

These "fallback handlers" would have to be URI-specific tho, because you may also want some ganarchy links on the same webpage, which uses web+ganarchy URIs instead. So you'd want, web+mastodon to be handled by a mastodon instance and web+ganarchy to be handled by a ganarchy instance.

Nothing gets registered tho, so if the user goes to another webpage, they get to either use their own handlers or if none are available, that webpage's specified fallback (if any).

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the proposed fallback behavior for the web+mastodon and web+ganarchy URI examples in the issue. Define how a webpage selects a URI-specific fallback without registering a handler globally, and consider the behavior when users move to another webpage; the work is done when those cases are specified clearly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
html
Domain
web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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