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HTTP: , FTP:, and Dict:?

I went for a spelunk0 through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok1. {<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer. But DICT?!?!?! It turns out that, lurking on […]

For many years, the Internet community has relied on the "webster" protocol for access to natural language definitions. You can understand why it was invented - in an age of low-size disk drives and expensive software, looking up data over a dedicated protocol seems like a nifty idea. Then disk size exploded, databases became cheap, and search engines made it easy to look up words.

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