# Re: Another snapshot of the URL document.

Dirk Herr-Hoyman (hoymand@gate.net)
Sat, 2 Jul 1994 07:40:03 -0400

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    Date: Sat, 2 Jul 1994 07:40:03 -0400

    Message-Id: <199407021140.HAA90808@inca.gate.net>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    From: hoymand@gate.net (Dirk Herr-Hoyman)

    Subject: Re: Another snapshot of the URL document.

Larry, Mark, and Tim the new and improved URL spec is looking good. The
whole document flows much better now, thank you.

I do have some concerns about the MAILTO URL, however.

At 12:19 AM 7/2/94 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
> 3.5. MAILTO
>
> The mailto URL scheme is used to designate the Internet mailing
> address of an individual or service. No additional information
> other than an Internet mailing address is present or implied.
>
> Mailto URLs take the form:
>
> URL:mailto:<rfc822-addr-spec>
>
> where <rfc822-addr-spec> is (the encoding of an) addr-spec, as
> specified in RFC 822. Within mailto URLs, no additional characters
> are reserved within the <rfc822-addr-spec> component.
>
> Note that the percent sign ("%") is commonly used within RFC 822
> addresses and must be URL-encoded.
>

First off, there is no port specified here, which makes this one different
from all the others. And perhaps it is. So, is this an interface to SMTP
mail or is it something else that doesn't have anything to do with SMTP
necessarily. Since you have carefully noted ports and RFCs that pertain in
other URLs, this seems out of place to me.

Secondly, there is no indication of current practice. In the HTML spec,
there is an MH element that allows one to create an SMTP style message. I
understand there we would like to not get into specifics in this document
(leaving that up to the implementors), but I do not even get a sense of
guidance here.

I might add that a URL that did specify an entire e-mail message would be
useful to some projects I am working on. There is information that might
ONLY be available via e-mail servers, but MAILTO does not let me specific
enough to be able to retrieve such info. I realize that doing e-mail
retrieval is asynchronous, which everything else here is synchronous.
Nonetheless, there is a need here and since we are creating a
specification, I would like to see this need filled.

    --
    Dirk Herr-Hoyman                  |
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