parsing mailto URIs into compose forms

I recently saw <http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/02/12/International-Mailto-URIs-in-IE7.aspx>,
which referenced
<http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/02/12/International-Mailto-URIs-in-IE7.aspx>.

I've been keeping notes at
<http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/rfc2368-1.html> on how
mailto clients do or should parse mailto URIs into compose forms.

The main issues seem to be with the handling of duplicate hnames,
which is inconsistent across clients.  Some clients only use the last
duplicate. Some only use the first.  Some join their values with a
delim.

Mozilla's Thunderbird and Opera's M2  for example handle duplicate
hnames using certain rules. Current bugs in each client aside, those
rules are very close to the ones described at
<http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/rfc2368-1.html>.

RFC2368 and RFC2822, don't describe how parsing of mailto URIs should
work in this case, so it appears that M2 and Thunderbird follow some
unwritten (but quite popular and expected) rules. (The way Thunderbird
handles multiple body and subject hnames is requested and demanded
quite often at <http://my.opera.com/>. It is also my opinion that
*most* of how Thunderbird handles mailto URIs is perfect and I would
like M2 and other clients to fix any bugs to be in sync.)

There's also the case with form submissions. Forms in current browsers
submit spaces as +, but mailto clients (non-http ones) don't decode +
to a space.

There's also the case of whether user input should be literal or escaped.

There's also the case of right-clicking on a link and choosing "copy
email addres". Should it copy just one address or all TO addresses?

Although this stuff is UI-specific, the correct behavior needs to
documented and specified.

RFC2368 (the new one linked above) or some other document should
describe what to do exactly. It could be described in a
non-ui-specific way, but something is needed so all clients can follow
the rules if the so choose.

How should these issues be addressed?

I'm happy to discuss specific rules from
<http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/rfc2368-1.html> if
you're interested.

Thanks

-- 
Mike

Received on Tuesday, 13 February 2007 06:13:52 UTC