Re: Revised Internet Draft: draft-ietf-uri-url-mailserver-01.txt

At 12:53 PM 2/8/95, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>Why not use the existing name for this piece of functionality:
>        mail-server
>as per MIME (rfc1521)?
...
>But why make up a new name for functionality that already exists?

As it was discussed before, "mailserver" is already reserved as a URL
scheme name based on earlier discussion in the URI WG. I assume that folks
in that discussion didn't know about "mail-server". I chose the
unhyphenated version so as to reuse that name, which I admit isn't a
terribly strong reason.

On the other hand, since our syntax is different than MIME's "mail-server"
access-type (section 7.3.3.4 in RFC1521, for those interested), I believe
that it might be better *not* to try to make them identical. Specifically,
"mail-server" is geared towards all-body messages. In order to include a
subject, you have to include a SUBJECT parameter. In the URL scheme, they
are fairly parallel fields.

In other words, I'm open to either name, but I think that using
"mail-server" may be more confusing to the MIME experts than using
"mailserver" would be to the millions of URL users who don't know anything
about MIME internals.

--Paul Hoffman
--Proper Publishing

Received on Wednesday, 8 February 1995 17:58:12 UTC