# mailto/mailserver, telnet URLs

Alexander Dupuy (dupuy@smarts.com)
Thu, 21 Jul 1994 20:48:57 +0500

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    Date: Thu, 21 Jul 1994 20:48:57 +0500

    From: dupuy@smarts.com (Alexander Dupuy)

    Message-Id: <9407220048.AA22781@just.smarts.com>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: mailto/mailserver, telnet URLs

Not to reopen the whole issue of hierarchical meaning for '/', but perhaps '/'
isn't really the best choice for a line delimiter in these proposed URLs,
especially since one common use of a mailserver/mailto URL will be to retrieve
files by mail, and the names of those files (on Unix systems, anyhow) are quite
likely to contain '/' characters which would need to be %-quoted.

I would suggest ';' as a better line delimiter character since it is much less
likely to occur in filenames (unless you have this desperate need to specify a
particular version of a VMS or TOPS-20 file) and since it already has a strong
tradition as a replacement for line breaks in numerous programming languages,
from the entire Algol family and descendants to scripting languages like the
various shells, perl and TCL.

It is already in the set of characters which may be reserved by URL schemes,
and also has no implications of hierarchical meaning, which will certainly
make some people happier.

Finally, it's probably worth mentioning in the spec that the line delimiter
should be sent as a NETASCII newline (that's CR-LF) in the resulting TELNET
and SMTP connections, for those people who bypass the system telnet and mailer
applications, which usually translate a raw \n into a CR-LF pair. If for some
reason you have a real need for a raw newline you can always use %0A.

@alex

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