395998 - support a "share:" protocol

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

support a "share:" protocol

faaborg writes:

I also think we need a "share" protocol so blogs don't have to hard code options (nytimes.com).

see attached screen shot.

Comment 1

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

Attachment: alex's screen shot

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

one concern is adding protocols to firefox might open up attack vectors, so I've cc'd the right people so they can weigh in.

Comment 3

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

A couple of concerns about creating a "psuedo" protocol to accomplish this
1) other browsers would need to support it for it to be worthwhile for pages to use it.

2) most sites that can share use a different format for accomplishing this.

3) pages that want to accomplish this in a simple to maintain manner can do so via templates or other "one modification mods all pages" method so why invent a new method that only accomplishes this for a subset of the site's visitors.

4) This puts the site in control of where the page can be shared or if it is shared at all. I believe it might be simpler (though permalinks would be difficult) to provide user defined "share" points and thereby put the user in control of how to share the page.

I'm sure there are others... these just cam to mind.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Couldn't our new web protocol handlers work here too? Maybe not as each service would need to register its own protocol handler

Comment 5

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I also think we need a "share" protocol so blogs don't have to hard code
> options (nytimes.com).

How would that work? There's only one protocol, but sites that put this kind of thing on want you to share with as many services as you can.

If one "share:..." link caused calls out to multiple registered services somehow, how would we be able to present login UI for each service if you hadn't yet logged in that day?

What happens if an evil website does <iframe src="share:..."> or document.location="share:..." -- do things become shared without your consent?

If multiple share sites get pinged from one share: link what happens when the user wants to share professional/educational stuff with the facebook crowd, but likes to send wacky stuff to digg and very little to both?

Comment 6

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Attachment: Share icon

Comment 7

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

It is starting to:

http://www.shareicons.com/
http://alexking.org/projects/share-icon
http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff

Comment 8

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Attachment: Comparison to RSS

Small diagram showing how this approach is similar to solving the UI challenge facing RSS.