“Exotic” protocols

Recently I have been working on a small forwarder that forwards a simple link to a server towards a non-http URL. This non-http URL launches an installed desktop application. The forwarder is necessary so that users can link to specific functionality within this application from forums. Usually, for safety reasons, forum software does not allow posting of URLs other than those that start with http://.

Recently I have been working on a small forwarder that forwards a simple link to a server towards a non-http URL. This non-http URL launches an installed desktop application. The forwarder is necessary so that users can link to specific functionality within this application from forums. Usually, for safety reasons, forum software does not allow posting of URLs other than those that start with http://. While working on this and testing it, I ran into a problem. It seems that Internet Explorer has a serious limitation. Consider the following (very simple) forwarder: header('location: tomtomhome://Something/Or/Other'); When you open this through Firefox, everything goes as planned, the desktop application is launched, and it will do Something/Or/Other. Unfortunately, when you open the same thing in Internet Explorer, for some reason you get a DNS error. The solution to this ended up being simple. Don't use the header() function. Instead, output a meta refresh html snippet to the browser. Internet Explorer does allow the changing of http:// to tomtomhome:// from there. It's weird why it would allow one but not the other, but the problem was solved
October 3, 2006 - tags: technology