Comments on Telephone Link Protocol Legendary scribbles about JavaScript, HTML5, AJAX, PHP, CSS, and ∞. 2012-12-20T13:43:50Z http://davidwalsh.name/phone-link-protocol/feed/atom WordPress By: jenski jenski http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40911 2012-12-07T07:59:52Z 2012-12-07T07:59:52Z Skype picks up on telephone-like numbers regardless of the tel: protocol, as far as I know.
Didn’t knew about the sms thing tho. tnx!

]]> By: Chase Chase http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40891 2012-12-06T22:19:38Z 2012-12-06T22:19:38Z I’ve worked on this a bit, and came up with a solution that for me has worked 99% (leave some room for error). It’s a pure js solution, and the source code describes the approach.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/13675901/124069

]]> By: bert bert http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40874 2012-12-06T15:52:49Z 2012-12-06T15:52:49Z “Since said links don’t work on desktop browsers”

I could see where the tel protocol could potentially be used to initiate a call on your desktop providing you had an installed softphone with a SIP account that had POTS termination.

]]> By: AV AV http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40864 2012-12-06T14:58:44Z 2012-12-06T14:58:44Z It can be a security problem. On many phones with phone numbers you can do many low level things like format the phone. A few months ago that appeared on news, and the standard android browser was vulnerable, opera mobile instead showed a security warning before launching the dialer. I don’t know about firefox.

]]> By: Dan Dan http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40815 2012-12-05T20:11:50Z 2012-12-05T20:11:50Z Stuart: That makes sense, maybe a pseudo-selector like ::unsupported-protocol.

But yeah in Chrome tel: and sms: links don’t seem to do anything at all (I would expect at least an error dialog) but I suspect Skype would register at least one of those, and Google Voice would be a perfect candidate to register handlers for both.

]]> By: Stuart Stuart http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40812 2012-12-05T19:40:49Z 2012-12-05T19:40:49Z “Since said links don’t work on desktop browsers, it’s probably wise to create a JS snippet to replace spans with a given CSS class with phone links.”

Ugh. That deprives desktop browsers, desktop browser add-ons, and other unknown browsers of the semantic information that they could use to do something useful with those links. Gmail supports sending text messages, for example – so a desktop browser add-on that does something clever with sms: protocol links to open up an appropriate gmail chat window would be perfectly possible… unless the web page decided not to bother sending sms: links to desktop browsers. Pretty sure there are web telephony apps for desktop computers that support making voice calls to phone numbers, as well.

In an ideal world (in my opinion) browser makers would be responsible for doing something sensible with links that they can’t resolve due to unsupported protocols – for example, it’d make sense to stylistically grey them out, add a tooltip indicating the functionality is unavailable, and offer a CSS pseudoclass and something in javascript to enable web authors to detect the situation and react accordingly.

I don’t know what to do in a world where browsers are unintelligent about invalid protocols, but I hate the idea of penalizing (future?) browsers and/or add-ons that ARE smart in order to protect current browsers that aren’t.

]]> By: John Holt Ripley John Holt Ripley http://davidwalsh.name/?p=5629#comment-40810 2012-12-05T19:07:28Z 2012-12-05T19:07:28Z I’ve not yet found a way to detect support for this protocol, other than UA detection – are you aware of a way to do it?

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