Re: An smtp URL scheme

On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:

> At 1:54p -0400 07/10/97, Greg Marr wrote:
>  >
>  > The general gist of the discussion was that in order to be 100%
>  > conformant, the & in the URL would have to escaped as sgml entities,
> 
> Eeek, that breaks the extended mailto:
> 
>    <A HREF="mailto:boo@best.com?subject=Test&amp;body=TheBody">
> 
> resulted in the following in Eudora 3.1:
> 
>    To:      boo@best.com
>    Subject: Test&body
> 
> because what that does is make it look like "Test&body" is the entire
> value of the "subject=" field.

Then Eudora is broken.  If you wanted Test&body you would write
<A HREF="mailto:boo@best.com?subject=Test%26body"> (I think %26 is right)
 
> Also, I believe a URL should remain constant no matter what application
> it appears in. Only markup-language applications would even understand
> the &amp; entity -- if I double-click the URL as shown above in Eudora
> (or launch it from *any* other non-browser application), it results in
> 
>    Subject: Test&amp;body
> 
> which is, of course, incorrect. And this would affect http URL schemes
> as well as mailto schemes, so it's not just an extended-mailto failing.

Enitites are allowed in attributes.  This allows us to do <IMG SRC="foo"
ALT="and then he said &quot;Let it be done&quot; and it was so">, and
similarly <A HREF="foo.html?lang=fran&ccedil;ais">.  This is why & must be
escaped as &amp; (or something equivlent).

-- 
Russell O'Connor            |              roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
        <http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eroconnor/>
"And truth irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message"
-- Anindita Dutta, "The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy"

Received on Thursday, 10 July 1997 22:55:39 UTC