I was mentioning my Matrix user id in my last blog post, and I wanted to mark it up as a hyperlink so that readers could click on it to contact me through Matrix. Or rather I want that to be possible in general.
Shall I use a “matrix:” URL scheme?
matrix:@julian:foad.me.uk
or microformats?
<span class="p-matrix">@julian:...</span>
Perhaps a URL scheme is a good place to start. How will software know to act on it? Before it’s universally implemented, we might expect to install a browser plug-in to act on it. What should it do? Bring up the user’s preferred Matrix message composer, if and when such a thing is configured in the user’s operating system (as is nowadays common for email links and some other kinds of links). Alternatively, bring up a “compose” action in some web UI that the plug-in knows about, such as https://riot.im/app/ .
Has anything like this been declared or implemented yet?
A partial answer:
https://matrix.to/#/@julian:foad.me.uk
brings up a web site offering ways to connect to my user id in Riot (using a direct link) and others that don’t support direct links. The Riot link is
https://riot.im/app/#/user/@julian:foad.me.uk
and the page has a link to issue #455 tracking this problem.