Re: <a href="mailto:email address">

At 10:26p -0700 07/07/98, Jukka Korpela wrote:
>On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Stephen Hui wrote:
>
>> You can set the values of subject, body and other information on such a
>> link.  It is done with the following:

[snip]

>Moreover, the URL itself has become invalid (404 File Not Found).
>That's what often happens to documents which describe some phases
>in works in progress. It _shouldn't_ happen of course, at least not
>to documents describing important working documents (which might
>well be of historical interest), but it does.

Like it's so hard to create a symlink/shortcut/alias... ::sigh::

>For the purposes of HTML authoring, the proposed extended syntax
>is harmful. It currently breaks on a large number of browsers.
>The normal safe way of adding extensions like this would be to add
>_attributes_ to the A element. Something like <A HREF="foo@bar"
>SUBJECT="some subject">

That is a very browser-specific method, and URLs should be "handleable"
by other kinds of apps (like Email, Usenet, etc.). The extended mailto
is functional in a non-HTML environment, which is its advantage.
Of course, then the discussion turns to "how about a new scheme?" ;)


-Walter

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 1998 13:59:09 UTC