SAFE URL: "safe://" cross browser support revisited!

Another thought occurred to me today which is along these lines - of multiple ways to access SAFEnetwork - is that even if the launcher doesn’t support it, individuals can still share SAFE links via a real web domain.

So for example, I could set up happybeing.com so that certain URLs there display a page which instructs people to download SAFE launcher, and provides the actual SAFE URL for the corresponding page being accessed.

Example:

I have a real SAFE URL which using @Krishna_Kumar’s scheme would be http://blog.happybeing.safenet

I can share this with anyone as: http://blog.happybeing.com (I own the domain happybeing.com). It won’t go directly to SAFE even if the user has SAFE launcher installed, because the launcher won’t recognise it as a SAFE URL (it’s my private little scheme).

So I have to set up a little server side php script at blog.happybeing.com to display a normal web page that explains: you just tried to visit a SAFE URL for a website that exists on the SAFEnetwork, but to visit it you must install SAFE launcher from here (link) and then click on http://blog.happybeing.safenet

It’s not ideal, because it is a bit more confusing than my safenetwork.net proposal because the shared URL differs from the actual SAFE URL. In the proposal they would be the same. It’s also more work, and different explanations, and variations on the URL format from different implemented, would add to the confusion. So I still think the safenetwork.net proposal would be better.