Re: Handling http:// URLs
Re: Handling http:// URLs
- Subject: Re: Handling http:// URLs
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2015 08:54:46 -0700
> On Oct 14, 2015, at 4:26 AM, Greg Weston <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> You could contrive a use case for just about any behavior you could imagine. Lacking the aforementioned concrete example, I can't come up with any of my own that aren't handled at least as well by a more "normal" mechanism and it strikes me that this has much more potential for abuse, or at least confusion and annoyance, than for unique utility.
It would allow feature parity for unofficial apps for a web-based service.
For example, it would be great if http://wikipedia.org URLs opened in a Wikipedia app like Articles or Wikipanion. Unfortunately the current system requires adding a web page in the wikipedia.org domain, so only the people who run Wikipedia can decide which app the URLs should open in, and presumably if/when they implement this they’ll choose their own official app. The developers of unofficial apps are SOL.
This perpetuates the walled-garden system that was (unintentionally?) made possible by the OAuth protocol, where the developers of a Web service get to act as gatekeepers controlling what apps can interact with the service. Twitter has been pretty abusive about this in the past, choking off 3rd party Twitter apps.
That said, having a choosable set of handlers for websites would require adding a bunch of UI features (probably in the Settings app) to let users configure and maintain and troubleshoot these bindings, which would increase the complexity of the OS. I can imagine this is why Apple’s HI design group hasn’t gone this route. Or maybe they’re still working out the UI design and it’ll show up in iOS 10?
—Jens
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