Re: [Uri-review] [uri-review] Review Request for Icon URI Scheme

[Joseph Holsten <[e-mail]>]

On Apr 9, 2010, at 6:06 AM, Toby Inkster wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 11:12 -0400, Pierre-Antoine LaFayette wrote:
>> I've put together a draft document for an icon URI scheme, used for
>> displaying platform specific icons in web pages, that I would like to
>> get some feedback on.
> 
> This seems to have pretty poor fallback behaviour in existing user
> agents. It would seem advantageous to reuse the existing HTTP scheme.
> 
> Rather than, have a URI of say:
> 
> 	<icon:image/jpeg;32>
> 
> Instead use:
> 
> 	<http://icons.example.net/image/jpeg;32>
> 
> Where icons.example.net is a domain name registered to someone
> shepherding this idea.

As you are recommending it, would you care to host this magic HTTP resource? Of course, we'd want to standardize on your host, as it would be needlessly complicated if every browser group used their own host.

Implementors tend to know where to look when they encounter an unknown URI scheme. Your idea has terrific fallback behaviour, but I'm not sure how best to inform developers that HTTP URIs with a host of icons.example.net. are okay to treat magically. Perhaps a HEAD request could say "More-Magic: icon"?

Also, congrats on the most useful variant of "Let's solve this URI scheme idea with HTTP URIs" that I've encountered this year.
--
http://josephholsten.com