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I don't see what's hard about mailto:. Your browser sees a mailto: link, and passes it off to OS default-open-action logic. Some program on your OS has register

by derefr 5y ago

I don't see what's hard about mailto:. Your browser sees a mailto: link, and passes it off to OS default-open-action logic. Some program on your OS has registered itself as wanting the mailto: scheme-association, so it gets opened. That program receives the mailto: URI as its ARGV[1], and can then parse it. In theory, different mail programs might do different things with a mailto: URI, or expect different things to be in a mailto: URI — but by registering an association with the mailto: scheme, they're claiming to do something useful with a mailto: URI if passed one.

hnlmorg 5y ago
It's not hard, it's just a lot of different stakeholders that need to be coordinated for it to work. And it took a long time for said products to get organised, meanwhile companies still needed convenient ways of allowing customers to contact them....hence the contact forms. It will be the same problem here. It's safer not to use a payto scheme if it is the difference between a future customer being unable to buy your services because they haven't yet got the latest associations installed.
- oauea 5y ago
  Even worse: The stakeholders in the companies that decide to have contact forms are generally not very technical. They probably never successfully installed a mail client in their life, so it's not very surprising they don't opt into using mailto links.
EE84M3i 5y ago
In addition to the OS handling, browsers will happily let Gmail or other websites handle mailto links. I believe they are normally registered with registerProtocolHandler[1] which is how, for example, Fastmail has a "Open mailto links from other sites in Fastmail" button in the advanced settings. Notably, payto does not seem to be on the allowlist for registerProtocolHandler. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/r...

by derefr 5y ago

hnlmorg 5y ago

It's not hard, it's just a lot of different stakeholders that need to be coordinated for it to work. And it took a long time for said products to get organised, meanwhile companies still needed convenient ways of allowing customers to contact them....hence the contact forms. It will be the same problem here. It's safer not to use a payto scheme if it is the difference between a future customer being unable to buy your services because they haven't yet got the latest associations installed.

oauea 5y ago
Even worse: The stakeholders in the companies that decide to have contact forms are generally not very technical. They probably never successfully installed a mail client in their life, so it's not very surprising they don't opt into using mailto links.

EE84M3i 5y ago

In addition to the OS handling, browsers will happily let Gmail or other websites handle mailto links. I believe they are normally registered with registerProtocolHandler[1] which is how, for example, Fastmail has a "Open mailto links from other sites in Fastmail" button in the advanced settings. Notably, payto does not seem to be on the allowlist for registerProtocolHandler. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/r...