[om] [IDEA] om urls

[David Carlisle]

> The characteristic URL that triggers such is the telnet protocol: a URL
> of the form telnet:my.host.my.do.main will try to find an application
> that can open a telnet session to the given host. 

This works because telnet: is an IETF registered URI scheme.
The chance that you'd get om: as a registered scheme (and widely
understood in client browsers) seems slim.

I'm not at all sure this is desirable anyway. You are encoding the XML
content of the expression inside the URI, this works up to a point, but
probably most URI handlers are expecting a relativly short URI pointing at
relativly long documents. You could just as easily encode an HTML
document inside a URI, but it's more common to put the HTML on the web
and point at it with a URI.... If you just use linking using a standard
scheme such as http, your browser will fire off a suitable application
if the entity returned has a mime type that is associated with that
application.

Mime types should also be registered, but unlike URI schemes, browsers
can be easily customised by end users to work with ad hoc mime types.

The proposal for XML mime types
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3023.txt
would have the mime type as application/openmath+xml. If you
serve .om files as application/openmath+xml then a browser
coming accross an http (or ftp or any other retrieval scheme)
link will use whatever helper application is associated with
that mime type in your browser's configuration or .mailcap file.

David
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