324747 - nsIURIContentListener2 Interface

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Boris and Christian have several things they want to add to a new URIContentListener interface, but firstly:

A new "doContent"-like method with a different name that calls the parent content listener and allows it to insert a stream converter. 

This would allow navigations to content of internally handled types (e.g. text/xml, application/rdf+xml) to be potentially converted to other types by specialized format converters (e.g. a RSS pretty printer). Right now this is only possible through isPreferred, which is only called for link clicks, not typed URIs.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

So I'd really like to get this actually done, documented, and maybe frozen by 1.9.

Ben, you have a proposed doContent extension as discussed, no?  Care to post the idl to get the ball rolling?

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

This is not related to bug 323810 comment 32.

In the Suite (and probably in Firefox, although they may have hacked around it with blank targets), Help wants all relative links to load in the same frame but force all absolute links out to load in the browser or wherever is appropriate. Unfortunately the current content listener code passes the redirected URL.

In a related issue, Thunderbird wants to do the reverse, that is, they want to force relative links to load in the same frame even though the URL is one that would normally be forced out to the external protocol handler. See bug 320628.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Help wants all relative links 

What's a "relative link"?  Keep in mind that we're working with nsIURI objects here.

> Unfortunately the current content listener code passes the redirected URL.

I'm not sure I follow this.

It sounds like the simple model that the "exposed protocol" setup provides is not enough for some use cases.... One could certainly stop using the "exposed protocol" stuff and use this API instead once we have it.