mailto links (weird behavior) about remark-external-links

[cedricdelpoux]

It sounds good to me @wooorm

[wooorm]

Currently, any URL that starts with a protocol is seen as external (through here and here).

We can go two ways: see every protocol except mailto as absolute, or see only http / https as absolute. What are your thoughts, and benefits / tradeoffs?

/cc @makenowjust (last person to touch that line)

[zslabs]

Hey @wooorm appreciate the quick reply as always. I could see this being a compounding issue for protocols like tel:, skype:, etc. A quick google search for all of them brought up https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml

Do you think it'd be worth trying to "whitelist" those in that list? I can't personally think of a time you'd want to have any of those protocols open up a new tab, but I'm not familiar with a bunch of 'em.

[wooorm]

I’m not really into adding a big list here 😕 So I’m up for allowing just http / https. But I can see potential exceptions in the future (about? blob? more?). Or just ignoring mailto for now and seeing where that goes?

[zslabs]

Yeah maybe just checking for http/https would be best for now; as I could make the same argument for a number of those in that list.

[wooorm]

/cc also maybe @xuopled or @fand have thoughts on this

[makenowjust]

Only Chrome (and Chromium family browsers like Vivaldi) remains a blank tab after clicking a mailto link having target=_blank attribute. Other browsers (Safari, Firefox and Edge) doesn't produce a new tab.

I think it is Chrome's problem, however treating only http/https is good workaround.

[wooorm]

Hmm, also like to add that people can set up mailto: to open in the browser (such as in Gmail or so). In which case the target=_blank definitely makes sense.

[zslabs]

Hmm, also like to add that people can set up mailto: to open in the browser (such as in Gmail or so). In which case the target=_blank definitely makes sense.

While I do agree there can be different cases for protocol URLs, I myself have never seen a target="blank" attached to a mailto: link; and is something they can easily customize on their own by just writing out the link as regular HTML if needed.

[wooorm]

How about the following pseudo-code changes?

• var defaultProtocols = ['http', 'https']
• var protocols = opts.protocols || defaultProtocols
• if (ctx && isAbsoluteURL(ctx.url) && protocols.indexOf(ctx.url.slice(0, ctx.url.indexOf(':')) !== -1)) {

...that would allow people to still specify their own protocols.

@zslabs Want to write a PR for this, with tests?

[zslabs]

Just created #10 let me know what you think. Thanks!