Interpreting a URL?

Mark Brownell gizmotron at earthlink.net
Mon Jan 16 10:55:25 EST 2006


> How ShellExecute Interprets the URL Passed:
>
> ShellExecute parses the string passed to it to extract either a 
> protocol specifier or a file extension, which it then uses to 
> determine what application to launch by looking in the registry.
>
>  If you pass "http://www.microsoft.com" to ShellExecute, the "http://" 
> sub-string is recognized as a protocol, which causes it to look at 
> "HKCR\http\shell\open" for information on how to execute. If you pass 
> "myfile.htm" to ShellExecute, the ".htm" sub-string is recognized as a 
> file extension causing it to look at "HKCR\.htm," which leads to 
> "HKCR\htmlfile\shell\open."

I'm looking for a way to have a hyperlink in an HTML page, viewed in 
your favorite browser, open my standalone application on Windows and 
Mac OSX versions, and have it load that URL in the hyperlink. So I'm 
thinking that this kind of a hyperlink would do the job:

<a href="mtml://www.somewhere.com/myfile.txt">Download it here</a> .

I got the idea from a discussion on RSS feeds where links like this: 
href="feed://www... are used to open a default RSS reader in order to 
subscribe to it.

I'm betting that some additional work on the registry would be needed 
where my app sets the registry for opening a file while launching my 
app. I would perhaps need to add "HKCR\mtml\shell\open" to the registry.

Has anyone done this already for Windows and/or for Mac? I will need to 
come up with an applescript solution for this as well.

Thanks for any advice,

Mark




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