Re: An smtp URL scheme

At 12:01a -0400 07/11/97, Jim Wise wrote:
 > On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
 >
 > > Eudora is not broken. Why should an email app give a hoot about SGML
 > > entities? It does not apply. Perhaps SGML is broken...
 >
 > This is correct.  The problem is not that URL's cannot contain
 > ampersands -- this is a perfectly valid method to pass URL's to
 > eudora from applications other than HTML.  The point is that when
 > embedding URLs in HTML, we need to do so in a way which is valid HTML
 > as well as a valid URL.  It is a failure of _the_browser_ if it finds
 > & in a URL within an HTML document and does not translate it to &.
 > It is not eudora's responsibility to do this.

So then it's like in programming languages where you'd put a backslash
in front of a metacharacter? OK, but it's just too bad this subject was
not hashed out sufficiently in 1993, because a URL must work in all
existing browsers, and an & in a URL clearly does not. It is thus
too late to change the browsers for SGML conformance, and I suggest that
HTML specify that attribute values for URIs should allow the following:

   <A HREF="/form.cgi?foo=bar&foo2=bar2">

and *not* consider &foo2 as an entity error.

__________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo_at_best*com>    Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter

Received on Friday, 11 July 1997 01:50:56 UTC