You use the arbortext-editor protocol to launch a Arbortext Editor session for a document from a link on a web page. In this case, the usual Arbortext Editor window is used to open the document, so Arbortext Editor must be installed or otherwise available on the local system. In general, when a web browser processes a link with an unknown protocol the browser checks the local system to see whether there is an application registered to handle the protocol. When Arbortext Editor is registered as a COM server on a Microsoft Windows system, part of that process associates Arbortext Editor with the arbortext-editor protocol.

For security reasons, most web browsers usually prompt the user before initially launching the associated program for a given protocol URI. Since Arbortext Editor is registered as the associated program for the arbortext-editor protocol, a browser generally displays a dialog box warning the user that this link will launch an application on their system and asking for confirmation before proceeding. Such dialog boxes generally have an option to not show the warning again for this protocol. If Arbortext Editor is not installed on the system, or is not registered for some reason, most browsers will display an error message saying that the protocol is not associated with an installed program.

Following is an example of an HTML link that would open Arbortext Editor for a document named sample.xml:

Note that if the link appears as an attribute value in HTML markup, then it is subject to the normal encoding rules of those attribute values. In particular, if the link contains the & character (such as if there is a query string with more than one parameter), then this must be encoded as &. For example, the following link:

should appear inside of an HTML link as follows: