- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2002 20:39:31 -0800
- To: "'Mark Nottingham'" <mnot@mnot.net>, "'Graham Klyne'" <GK@ninebynine.org>
- Cc: "'Roy T. Fielding'" <fielding@apache.org>, "'Tim Berners-Lee'" <timbl@w3.org>, "'Paul Prescod'" <paul@prescod.net>, <uri@w3.org>
There were discussions about 'mailto' on the URI list from 1995 through 1998; note, for example, the single mailbox & 'resource' theory in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/1997Jan/0003.html as opposed to the text in the final RFC. RFC 2368 was written to correspond to the practice of "mailto", rather than the theory of URIs which has them always identifying resources. A mailto with multiple targets and a "subject" line isn't a very good resource identifier, but it works in hrefs. An unadorned "mailto" with a single mailbox identifier can also work as a resource identifier. So practice doesn't match theory, and trying to fit it is pretty unsatisfactory: I don't think it's worth it to try to shoehorn "mailto:bob@example.org,mary@example.com" into the theory that URIs _always_ identify resources. That one doesn't, and making up a story about it doesn't help out much. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Saturday, 6 April 2002 23:41:45 UTC