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wave: URI Scheme

One of my major gripes against Wave is that there is no good way to link. If you copy and paste the URL, it never autolinks, and if it does, then it totally epic fails in the process for most content systems. The URLs are insanely long, and totally ignores the federated nature. If you want a federated protocol you shouldn’t do links by copy and pasting client URLs.

Similar to the mailto: protocol used in HTML. I think a wave: protocol would be far more suitable. HTML5 has this feature called navigator.registerProtocolHandler which while part of the recommendation, is only implemented by Firefox 3.0+

How awesome is this new linking system? Well, the great thing is that Extracting the URL is totally easy:

https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:search:with%253Apublic,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BAf00O-Y67

That’s the URL, copy and paste it to a browser and it will open in google wave (well the software can be configured to open up in any wave client which is why this is so important)! You get to totally get rid of all the stuff before that makes it specific to the Google Wave client.

Link to the wave discussion of this yes and obviously the link is linked using MY protocol handler.

Well, browsers don’t come out of the box with support for the wave: protocol, so how do I get it to work? Well, there are a few issues that make it harder.

  • Wave IDs are double-escaped
  • %s auto escapes
  • registerProtocolHandler only registers URls for sites for their own site (antimatter15.com can not register wave: handler for wave.google.com)
  • Inconsistency with using the unescaped, or single escaped or double escaped wave IDs

So first I tried hacking it together with jsbin, but it gave errors. After re-reading documentation on mozilla’s devwiki. I tried making a bookmarklet. After that made issues with esaping, I started making a redirect server for it.

So the now working thing is here: http://antimatter15.com/misc/wave/uri/install.htm

It still has linkability issues because nobody can rely on the autolinking scripts as they all probably ban the wave: protocol (and with many sites, manual linking would also be banned).

Posted in Google Wave.


5 Responses

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  1. Nadine says

    Hi there,
    Where are you from? Is it a secret? :)
    [url=http://iphone-ipod.110mb.com/]Nadine[/url]

  2. Polprav says

    Hello from Russia!
    Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?

  3. admin says

    Sure! that would be awesome.

  4. qMax says

    doesn’t work in chrome 4.0.x (“browser doesn’t support the HTML5 window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler spec!”)

    btw, Lars recently confirmed they design wave: uri scheme to make waves/wavelets/blips addressable, and even at specified revision.

  5. admin says

    Can you please link to the place where Lars confirmed that, it would be very interesting. Chrome doesn’t yet support the window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler spec (Amazing! I know, Chrome isn’t actually a 100% implementation of HTML5, no browsers implement it all).



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