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

>This relates to my suggestion of adding attributes to the syntax
>of A elements. In what particular sense would that be very
>browser-specific? As I mentioned, it would downgrade gracefully,
>unlike the extended URL syntax.

It is browser specific in that it would only work in HTML.  A URI is
designed to be used outside of HTML, by itself.  The extended mailto URI
allows one to pass extended information outside of HTML.  One would still
need an extended mailto URI to pass the data to an external application from
an HTML document.  <A href="mailto:whoever" subject="whatever"> would have
to be translated to mailto:whoever?subject=whatever before it is passed to
an external mail program.  How else would the subject be passed to the
external mail app?  I know; some OS specific hack would need to be
reinvented.

There are implications in any case.  Your way doesn't work in certain cases,
and, their way doesn't work in certain cases.  It doesn't really bother me
either way.  If then current mailto spec doesn't work on a browser then I am
inclined to find one that works.  I am not one to complain that a 4 year old
program doesn't work with my new way of doing things.  I just tend to
complain for a minute and fix it.

Since this is only a working draft, we shouldn't beat our heads over it :)

,David Norris

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Received on Thursday, 9 July 1998 03:10:29 UTC