In <news:3A8C0F99.9EE3DB8F@sun.com>, there's a reference to a proposal at <http://www.mozilla.org/directory/addrbook-refactoring-proposal.html> which includes adding some new mozilla-internal URI schemes. It would be nice if we could do this in such a way that there was some assurance that we're not breaking fowards-compatibility. RFC 2396, at least, doesn't seem to provide any guidance about how the URI scheme namespace is or should be managed. Prefixing new URI schemes with moz- has been suggested. Is this the reasonable / correct thing?

The suggested moz- prefix sounds good to me (x- may also be a good choice, given that it's already in use for non-standard MIME types).

IANA keeps track of registered scheme names: ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/url-schemes/ There is a Best Current Practice document titled "Registration Procedures for URL Scheme Names": http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2717.txt

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2717.txt would seem to suggest that we would be best off using a "moz-" prefix on our schemes. We should actually register the "moz-" prefix, but that document is unclear as to how to go about doing that. Reassigning to <mozilla.org@pidgin.org>. If you can find out how to register new trees, please do tell us, otherwise feel free to mark this bug FIXED, as you found out the answer. Cheers!

I don't know of any existing registration procedures for the prefixes. However, this (expired) Internet-Draft proposes the form vnd.moz.foo: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-king-vnd-urlscheme-02.txt

Using moz-foo: probably isn't perfect, but it seems to be the best course in the absence of any further guidance/administration from IANA and the IETF.

VERIFIED: I think everyone is in agreement here, so I've changed the summary to reflect that. We keep a list of badly named schemes in bug 130089.