Its a standard in the sense that several PP 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 doesnt mean its not a standard  The File Sharing Community means part of the developers of PP applications Specifically for this context the people that participate in the magneturi 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 files own properties not location as with httpftp links Magnets and torrents are different but there are some striking similarities recent versions they dont support it out of the box thats true Either the application registers the magnet protocol in the system Most pp apps do that on Windows which allows the browsersIE 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 dont ship with magnet support but its not a plugin either Its just a setting and most application take care of that for the user