Registering Your Own Formats
 

Is there any way I can link my own format to something? Say, for instance, to get an image, specified with <img> tags in HTML, to display according to an executable, if it contains a certain file extention?

My first guess is that it's not possible, since the decoding is built into Internet Explorer. Or can I get all programs to recognize a specified format? I'm hoping?

But I thought that there me be some way around that. It would see that the source of the tag is requesting this custom type, download the information, and convert it to a PNG in the temp folder, by running it through an executable? Is there no way around this?

I'm shooting in the dark here.

Could you use plug-ins instead?

Make a browser plugin.

Oh, a browser plugin? That should work perfectly. I'll look into it. Thanks.

Out of curiosity, why would you want to do this?

Sending images that will have definite restrictions set on them (maximum two colors, large blank white spaces). A custom encoding will allow for a smaller file size than any other existing format. This is not meant to replace any existing image type, or be used by anyone other than me.

It may be a little late, but I just stumbled upon a Firefox plugin called greasemonkey. According to its companion website, Dive Into Greasemonkey:

I haven't tried it (there is a mac version called creammonkey, for those interested) but it sounds like it's what you're looking for.

This is what most file formats already do (PNG can be a monochrome picture, and its compression algorithm will take care of the white spaces. BMP supports also monochrome bitmaps, and using RLE you can compress large blank white spaces).

On a slightly familiar not, I had plans of making KHML (Komodo's Hypertext Markup Language)...

I'd only do it if I could think of enough shi to make it unique enough for people to want to look at it...