Re: "Mailto" Command

Dan Connolly said:

| It's important to keep the HTML spec independent of the URL specs.
| Note that the HTML spec doesn't mandate any list of graphics formats
| either.

So if this is a FAQ and an frequently requested feature, why it is not
added to HTML in a clean way ? This can not be done following the same
mechanism as used with <applet>:
	<applet ...>
		<param ...>
		Text for non Java Browsers
	</applet>

This is defining a semantic for the <applet> mixed content model, where
element content is used by an aware application and discarded by others.
Character content is discarded by the aware and displayed by the unaware
application. The trick is having all elements EMPTY.

Similarily one could try something like this to enhance mailto: anchors

	<a href="mailto:...">
		<mailheader key="Subject" VALUE="Re: ACME advertisement">
		<mailheader key="CC"      VALUE="big@brother.com">
		Click here for free demo
	</a>

But in this case the decision whether to process or discard the <mailheader>
tags *are* dependant on the URLīs protocol part. The role of mailto is
to make <a> a *typed* anchor, something like

	<a class="mailto" href="joe@user.org">

So is it really possible to give the requested functionality without
a dependence of URL and HTML ? A cheap way out is to add tons of new
attributes to <a>, but is this desireable ?

	++im
-- 
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Mail  : Ingo.Macherius@tu-clausthal.de WWW: http://www.tu-clausthal.de/~inim/
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Received on Sunday, 6 April 1997 20:11:47 UTC