RE: form emails

> From:	Frank Boumphrey [SMTP:bckman@ix.netcom.com]
> 
> You can use a query string for this, see
> 
	[DJW:]  
	Firstly this is about URLs, not HTML, so is outside the
	scope of this list.

	[DJW:]  It's not a query string.  Query strings are
	only defined for HTTP type URLs.  The design of the 
	syntax may look like HTTP query string syntax, but
	the syntactic entity is actually called "headers".

>     http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2368.txt
> to,cc,subject, and body are the key words.
> 
	[DJW:]  The RFC says that user agents may ignore headers
	names they consider unsafe and indicates that only subject, body
	and keywords (one word) are likely to be safe. IE 5.01 ignores
	"to".

	It also says that authors can only rely on subject and body, 
	although I'd point out that internet HTML should assume the use
	of browsers that pre-date this RFC and not even assume
	that subject, and, in particular body, will work.

> '?', '&', and '=' are reserved and need to be encoded to their
> hexa-decimal
> ascii number. eg & is %26. Note that the RFC suggests using html entities
> such as &, but all the email clients that I have tried it on do not
> accept this so it is better to use the hexadecimal code.
	[DJW:]  
	Ob HTML:  This is only the case for HTML and any HTML user
	agent that doesn't decode entities in this context is severely
	broken.  It doesn't apply when the URL is keyed into the address
	bar of a browser or when it embeded in email, as these are non-HTML
	contexts.  Resolution of &, etc., is a job that the browser
	should do for all HTML element parameters (and text).

	Really this requirement should not have been in the
	specification of the URL form, but it was probably 
	desirable given the almost universal invalid omission
	of & in query strings in embedded HTTP URLs.  It is
	true for all URLs embedded in HTML, but is HTML, not URL
	related.

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Received on Tuesday, 31 October 2000 06:46:43 UTC