RE: telephone URLs, comments on draft-antti-telephony-url-04

Hello,

By the way, version -05 should be available from I-D respositories any
time now, so that should be taken as the base for discussion from now
on.

L. Masinter:
> Perhaps it would be useful to include the rationale in the document,
> namely: some subscriber networks require different call-setup,
> so the access methods are different, the same phone number accesses
> different resources if the call is voice, fax, or modem.

I will do this for the next revision.

L. Masinter quoting me:
> > Phone numbers (in their international form) are unambiguous, and one
> > would need information on country codes and area prefixes if he
would
> > like to create a hierarchical URL based on an E.123 style phone
number.
> > The creator of the URL will potentially have to know all country
codes
> > and area prefixes inside that country to be successfully able to
write
> > down the URL.
> 
> I don't understand this.

What I meant was this: consider that a program acquires many phone
numbers in the international format, such as from a form on a web page,
and it automatically creates URLs from that data. The program would
potentially have to know all of the country and area codes in the world
to be able to successfully translate each number from E.123 (E.164)
notation into the hierarchical notation.

L. Masinter:
> I would support an equivalence, e.g.,
> 
>    fax:+1-650-812-4333   ==  fax://1/650/812-4333

This could be something that could be thought of. However, this would
eventually force the implementors to implement both URL types. Adding
the "hierarchical-number" would, however, cause only minor trouble if
the user agent is already supporting global-phone, since it can just
ignore all "/" characters (treat them as <visual-separator>) and use the
number as is.

To better support the local numbers, perhaps a "scope" modifier could be
added to the current list of modifiers (postd and isub). So the URL
would become

fax:234-567890;scope=us   and   fax:///234/567890;scope=us

Or something to that effect, anyway. What do you think?
Note that the country code is omitted from the hierarchical URL. In a
situation where there is no area code (Denmark? Can anyone confirm
this?), would there then be null strings in the hierarchical URL?

Best regards,

Antti

--
antti.vaha-sipila@nmp.nokia.com - Personal: avs@iki.fi
Replying to a mailing list? Cc: me.
Opinions are mine, not of my employer.

Received on Monday, 29 June 1998 10:51:09 UTC