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aim:goim? ~~~ How does this work?

Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 6:47 pm
by hawleyjr
Throughout the post there are links to IM people. (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ) The MSN link gives the username, the yahoo opens an applet to chat but the aol uses the following link which opens AIM

Code: Select all

aim:goim?screenname=aimusername&message=Hello+Are+you+there?
At first glance this appears to be analogous to the mailto:email@test.com

How is this done? Is this something Aol installs when you install AIM? How is it even possible that aol is doing something smarter then others....? (Sorry had to insert the AOL slam)

Anyway, just curious....

Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 6:51 pm
by tim

Re: aim:goim? ~~~ How does this work?

Posted: Mon Apr 05, 2004 9:32 am
by Roja
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.

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 10:38 am
by malcolmboston
something i found at last night

for windows users:

outlook://
is a valid protocol handler if you have outlook express installed