Re: mailto: + parameters?

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@beach.w3.org> wrote:
>In message <01I3KR5J3XAA004RJA@SCI.WFBR.EDU>, Foteos Macrides writes:
>>
>>	The use of ?subject=bla in mailto URLs is not "just" ignoring
>>W3CofVendors "working drafts", but also flagrantly violates the IETF
>>"Standards Track" specification -- and is needless, because the TITLE
>>attribute can cook that soup without breaking mailto URLs or other
>>clients.
>
>Hmmm.. I wouldn't say that. This issue has been discussed at length,
>and several proposals similar to mailto:foo@bar?subject=xxx have
>been made. See, for example, the mailserver thread on the uri mailing list:
>
>http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&fmt=.&
>	q=host%3Awww.acl.lanl.gov+%2Bmailserver
>
>If something along these lines is in operation today, I'd like to
>see it written up. Anybody care to write up this revision of the
>mailto: URL scheme? You can write it as an IETF draft if you like,
>or we can publish it as a W3C working draft.

	The mailserv proposal is an expired IETF draft (the finger
proposal also has expired, unfortunately, without replacement or
enhancement).  One reason for creating a new access type is to
provide such functionality without breaking mailto, i.e., to
maintain and cheerish the interoperability principle.

	That was also the reason, wasn't it, for adding nntp as an
access type which accepts a host field, and leaving news as an access
type which uses an independently configured host?  That's another
interoperability principle, embodied in RFC 1738, which has been
trashed.

 
>There's been a lot of noise about revising RFC1738. I'm not sure what
>exactly is going to happen along those lines.

	It needs to make clear that a comma-separated list of conformant
addresses is acceptible in mailto URLs.  The current phraseology is subject
to the interpretation that only one address is permitted, but I don't think
that was intended, and it certainly wasn't the existing practice when
1738 became Standards Track.

				Fote

=========================================================================
 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
 MACRIDES@SCI.WFBR.EDU         222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
=========================================================================

Received on Wednesday, 17 April 1996 16:39:59 UTC