Chromium safelist dweb URL schemes Link to heading

Today, as part of a change by Frédéric Wang, Chromium allows website to register their ability to support distributed web URL schemes.

Website gateways, such as Cloudflare IPFS Gateway or IPFS.io would be able to use Chrome navigator API to serve Native DWeb URLs. These new schemes are the following:

Organisation	scheme	Example URL
Cabal Club	`cabal`	`cabal://1eef9ad64e284691b7c6f6310e39204b5f92765e36102046caaa6a7ff8c02d74`
Dat Foundation	`dat`	`dat://778f8d955175c92e4ced5e4f5563f69bfec0c86cc6f670352c457943666fe639/dat_intro.gif`
W3C	`did`	`did:example:123456`
	`dweb`
Ethereum Foundation	`ethereum`	`ethereum://0x89205a3a3b2a69de6dbf7f01ed13b2108b2c43e7/transfer?address=0x8e23ee67d1332ad560396262c48ffbb01f93d052&uint256=1`
Dat Foundation	`hyper`	`hyper://778f8d955175c92e4ced5e4f5563f69bfec0c86cc6f670352c457943666fe639/dat_intro.gif`
Protocol Labs	`ipfs`	`ipfs://QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/`
Protocol Labs	`ipns`	`ipns://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/`
Scuttlebutt	`ssb`

They join the schemes registered at IANA that make it into web browsers.

Registering protocol handler Link to heading

The navigator API has, for quite some time, had the ability to register custom protocol handler. This is how Gmail can handle mail addresses URLs starting with mailto:, or your favorite torrent client can recognise magnet link with magnet:.

To register an IPNS handler, the code would be the following

navigator.registerProtocolHandler(
	"ipns", // scheme
    "https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/%s", // Gateway URL
    "Cloudflare IPFS Gateway", // title, displayed to the user at registration time
)

What does this mean? Link to heading

Gateway usages Link to heading

Registering a custom handler would abstract away the underlying protocol and proxy requests through an HTTP website. For IPFS for instance, clicking ipns://app.uniswap.org would still pass you through Cloudflare IPFS Gateway. It could allow deep linking with a desktop application, such as IPFS Desktop, but this is still unclear.

Alternative name system Link to heading

For alternative name system, this would be quite handy, as it provides a direct access to the URL. We could imagine ipns://uniswap.eth or even ipns://uniswap.crypto . Both ENS domains and Unstoppable domains could have a handler for these URLs.

Client side verification Link to heading

Ultimately, if there are (and I don’t know) web workers capable of handling these newly safelisted schemes, there would be a way towards client side content verification. And this is major.

We could imagine a service worker running and verifying the hash of the received content. It would provide a strong guarantee about the content that is being served, without requiring any extensions or local process to be installed.

Looking forward Link to heading

This step from Chromium would allow further experimentation in the distributed web. While having the browser resolve and handle these schemes would make sense, allowing websites to register their ability to handle them should provide a fertile ground for innovation.