Re: Comments on draft-duerst-mailto-bis-04.txt, please

Felix Sasaki wrote:
> are you referring to this example in the draft?
> 
> Email address: "not@me"@example.org; corresponding mailto: URI:
>    <mailto:%22not%40me%22@example.org>.

No, that's completely different. That's using "%40" to represent something 
*other* than the special "@" separator of components. I'm talking about when 
"%40" is used by URI producers to represent the main, special-purpose "@".

In theory, mailto:user%40example.org is not equivalent to 
mailto:user@example.org ...but in practice, it is. If it were up to me, I 
would acknowledge this in the spec by saying something along the lines of:

 A mailto URI containing the percent-encoded octet "%40" in place of "@" 
 in the addr-spec may be a valid URI in general, but does not conform to 
 the mailto URI syntax. Interpretation of such malformed mailto URIs is 
 implementation-dependent, but consumers of such URIs commonly regard
 them to be equivalent.

I might go a step further and say

 Such equivalence may be recognized in scheme-based normalization
 (STD66 sec. 6.2.3) by normalizing the "%40" to "@".

Mike