hawleyjr wrote:At first glance this appears to be analogous to the mailto:
email@test.com
How is this done?
Its called a "Protocol Handler", and yes, AOL, and AOL-IM installs a new protocol handler. Basically, when you click on a protocol link (xxxx:) windows looks for a program that has volunteered to handle that link.
There are:
telnet://
gopher://
ftp://
http://
https://
and the list goes on.
It is fairly slick, and you can in fact create your own (wicked:// ?).
However, you need to have a protocol handler for that protocol, and that can be fairly non-trivial to code on windows.