Create Application "web" protocol

Question

I am using chrome and I see this line when hovering over a link

steam://run/17730

An example exists at the link below, click play game which opens a dialog and then hover over "Yes I have steam".

http://store.steampowered.com/app/17730/

This appears to be a restful command to a client application using an application specific protocol, in this case the "Steam game management service"
My question is this

• if it is not a local command what is it?
• If it is a local command, how could I implement something like this using say a Bill:// protocol.

I can't find anything on this so this may be tagged incorrectly, I apologize for that.

Answer 1

It seems that steam has registered a protocol with the browser which communicates with the local steam process. The following link might get you started with registering your own protocol in firefox at least:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2087-MZES-9065

I would guess that there are similar links on the steam support site for other browsers.

The other part of this is probably going to be writing a simple local web server that can receive and respond to these requests. I'm not sure what language you are working in but an example for C# is the following: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/36517/Communicating-from-the-Browser-to-a-Desktop-Applic. Best of luck!