Page Collections

[bokand]

Introduction

Today, linking on the web is largely one-to-one. A user wishing to share a collection of resources must share the links individually and recipients must click through each link individually and, if their UI supports it, manually group the opened resources.

This is a proposal to enable users and authors to collect multiple resources into a single link. An agent navigating to such a link is able to load and present all the link's resources in a grouping UI. We're calling such a link a "page collection", e.g.:

uri-list:https://example.com/pageA;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL;https://w3.org

Page collections aims to allow the user agent to be more helpful in opening and presenting multiple related pages, for example, by opening each page as a tab in a tab group.

No grouping UI is suggested or mandated by this proposal; how such a link is presented will be left to the discretion of the user agent.

Summary of proposed web-facing changes

• (loosely) Specify web browser handling of text/uri-list media types.
• Introduce a uri-list: URI scheme to allow users to easily share collection links.
• Add an opt-in for for anchors (i.e. <a>) to non-uri-list schemes to allow opening a collection (i.e. a regular http(s) link that responds with Content-Type: text/uri-list.
• Define a permission model for when a collection link may open multiple windows.
• Use content negotiation to allow servers to feature detect user agents capable of handling text/uri-list responses.

Read the complete Explainer.

Feedback (Choose One)

I welcome feedback in this thread, but encourage you to file bugs against the Explainer.

[ghost]

Hi @bokand, how are you?

A curious question: would it be possible to include text fragments in uri-list?

uri-list:ws://test.com/aaaa/demo/issues/92/#:~:text=25,567;ftp://site-demo.com/aaa/t/a/92/#:~:text=25,567;https://w3.org
uri-list:UTF8,25,567,ws://demo-demo.com/as/wiki/a/92;UTF8,25,567,ftp://site-demo.com/a/1/aaa/0001

what do you all think of this idea: include text fragments in uri-list?

[bokand]

Yup, text fragments are just URL fragments so there's no reason that shouldn't work. Implementors would have to exercise a bit of caution, for reasons listed in the Abuse and Security section, but I expect those wouldn't be a blocker. Indeed, the scroll-to-text spec already prevents scrolling in background tabs.

(Although, note: you'd have to percent encode the fragment in the constituent URLs so they aren't interpreted as the fragment of the "outer" uri-list)

[ghost]

Yup, text fragments are just URL fragments so there's no reason that shouldn't work.

Could you include this idea in your proposal?