  :It's a standard in the sense that several P2P applications' developers agreed on using the same syntax. (Those are LimeWire, BearShare, Shareaza, Kazaa, DC++, Azureus, and others). It might not be an official IETF standard, but that doesn't mean it's not a standard.  :The 'File Sharing Community' means part of the developers of P2P applications. Specifically (for this context) the people that participate in the magnet-uri Yahoo mailing list. The draft seems vague, but if you have a question, you can ask the people on that mailing list. Platform independance is true, as the links work in Azureus, which is crossplatform. :Bittorrent files and magnet links allow you to do the same thing: download a file without knowing the location beforehand, and just searching for it because of the file's own properties (not location, as with http/ftp links). Magnets and torrents are different, but there are some striking similarities. :'recent versions...', they don't support it out of the box, that's true. Either the application registers the magnet 'protocol' in the system (Most p2p apps do that on Windows), which allows the browsers(IE and Firefox do that without extra configuration, in Opera you have to specify it manually) to send the magnet links to the right application. So browsers don't ship with 'magnet' support, but it's not a plugin either. It's just a setting, and most application take care of that for the user. 