CD to Auto-Open Webpage

Question

A friend of mine wants to hand out CDs (yes, compact disks) as invitations for a party. When someone puts the CD into their computer, it should automatically load a webpage used for RSVPing to the party. How can I go about getting this done?

I know Windows has a default browser stored somewhere that I think can be used without worrying about cross platform issues, is this correct? What about Apple users?

Answer 1

You can do this in Windows very simply, but supporting Linux/OS X will be harder.
Windows Autorun.inf support does what you want - all you need is a URL to be opened and it will open in the user's default browser:

Shellexecute=http://mypartyinvite.com

On OS X you could use a .webloc file. The user would still need to open the CD and double-click on the file, but then the OS will handle opening the link inside the user's default browser.

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>URL</key>
    <string>http://mypartyinvite.com</string>
</dict>
</plist>

On Linux I don't know what you'd do, perhaps a shell script for the user to double-click that cleverly determined the environment and made an educated guess at the browser to open?

Answer 2

This is a a bad idea. Everyone should have autorun functionality disabled on their computer, and any decent virus scanner will throw a fit if a CD attempts to automatically navigate to a web page.

I know Windows has a default browser stored somewhere that I think can be used without worrying about cross platform issues, is this correct?

No, that's not correct. It doesn't make much sense, either. You can't rely on a feature present in Windows to alleviate cross-platform issues. Windows is a single platform.

What about Apple users?

There is no such thing as "Apple" users. But no, it won't work for them either. Mac OS X just flat doesn't support this feature. It was semi-supported through QuickTime in previous versions of the Mac OS (i.e., Mac OS 9 and earlier), but it was considered so vile, exploitable, and ill-behaved by Mac users that
Apple just ripped it from OS X entirely.

Find another way to invite people to your party. Finally a compelling use for Facebook or Twitter!