Handling Custom Protocols

I'm looking to respond to an event from a web browser, hopefully any web browser. I'm working solely on windows and I came to the conclusion a custom protocol (I.E. myprot://collection/of/strings) is the best approach here (any objections?). But, handling an instance of this protocol seems to be a little less straight-forward. All I need is that collection of strings auto-magically passed to my already running application! (the app will only respond to these links while in a specific waiting state)

So answer me this, if you can, Whats the 'popular' method开发者_StackOverflow of handling them or better yet Whats the 'best' (subjective - I know) way to do it?

Although your answers don't need to be specific to my language, I am using Delphi for development.

Thanks!

Why not use the regular urls? http://localhost/myhandler/collection/of/strings. To the best of my knowledge custom protocols only work for IE and you still need to install the handler on the client computer.

In the past I used custom protocols in one of my projects to support laptops working offline, but it was back in the time when installing IIS on a laptop was a call for trouble. but now - what's the point?