# x-uri draft

Martin Hamilton (martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk)
Mon, 07 Nov 1994 13:34:00 +0000

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    Message-Id: <199411071334.NAA27931@lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: x-uri draft

    Date: Mon, 07 Nov 1994 13:34:00 +0000

    From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>

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Hi,

I've written up my proposal for an X-URI: header as a sort of pseudo
Internet Draft. Before touting it around anywhere else I thought I
would post it here to see if there were any comments, flames, ... :-)

Cheerio,

Martin

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Content-Description: X-URI draft

Network Working Group Martin Hamilton
INTERNET-DRAFT Loughborough University of Technology
Category: Experimental November 1994
Expires: ???

The X-URI Header
<draft-???-00.txt>

Status Of This Memo

This document specifies a experimental mechanism for including
personal contact information in RFC 822 format messages.
This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working
documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts
as reference material or to cite them other than as ``work in
progress.''
To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the
``1id-abstracts.txt'' listing contained in the Internet- Drafts
Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast),
nic.nordu.net (Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or
munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim).
Abstract
Uniform Resource Identifiers are widely used as an out-of-bound
mechanism for communicating personal contact information, notably
in electronic mail and Usenet News postings. This document
specifies a slight formalisation of the current approach which
would provide a common mechanism for attaching this information to
RFC 822 format messages at very little implementation cost.
1. Rationale
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) [Bern94b] are used on a day-to-day
basis in a large number of electronic mail and Usenet News messages
as a way of communicating personal contact information. The most
common practice is for the message originator to include a URL in
their "signature" - typically in one of the following formats:
o an HTML [Bern94a] fragment
<a href="http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html">me</a>
o a verbatim URL
http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
o a URL prefixed by "URL", "WWW" or similar
URL: http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
o a URL formatted as per Appendix A of [Bern94b]
<URL:http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html>
The [Bern94b] document is currently on the Internet standards track,
hence it would seem reasonable in this context to adopt its
recommendation for the plaintext encoding of URLs.
In addition to placing contact information in the message signature,
there is also some usage of custom RFC 822 [Croc82] headers - e.g.
o X-www: http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
o X-URL: http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
It should be noted that the vast majority of programs which
manipulate RFC 822 style messages need to be able to parse their
headers. There is no such necessity to parse the body of the
message. This mitigates in favour of adding the originator's URI
as a custom RFC 822 header.
The <URL:...> format may also be used to refer to other Uniform
Resource Identifiers (URIs), in particular the under-development
Uniform Resource Name (URN) [Weid94]. Thus it would be appropriate
to use a generalised header (X-URI:) rather than one for each type
of URI (X-URL:, X-URN: and so on).
2. Specification
This document defines an experimental RFC 822 header - "X-URI:".
The right hand side of this header should consist of a URI
specified by the message originator and encoded as per the
plaintext encoding rules for URLs defined in [Bern94b], e.g.
X-URI: <URL:http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html>

3. Advice to implementors
Many existing mail and news readers provide the capability of
adding custom headers, and it is trivial to add this functionality
to those which do not. Implementors should make it possible for
their users to configure the URI on an individual basis!
Where built-in support for URIs is not available, implementors
should provide their users with the option of launching an
appropriate tool pointing at the specified URI. Since the leading
"URL:" prefix is not widely implemented as yet, it would be prudent
for implementors to provide an option to strip this from the URI
before passing it to this tool, e.g.
http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
Any whitespace included in the X-URI: header should be removed -
X-URI: <URL:ftp://some.very.long.domain.name/an/even_longer_path
.html>
would be whitespace-stripped as
URL:ftp://some.very.long.domain.name/an/even_longer_path.html

4. Implementation Information
Contact the author for implementation details.
5. Security Considerations

Implementors should offer their users the opportunity to inspect
the URI before it is dereferenced. Since looking up some URIs may
have undesirable consequences, it is important that the user should
be given the oppportunity to decide whether to proceed.
If the URI is to be passed to an external program, implementors are
advised to first process it to remove any undesirable meta-
characters.

6. References

[Croc82] D. Crocker, "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet
text messages." RFC 822. August 1982.
<URL:ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc822.txt>
[Bern94a] T. Berners-Lee, "HyperText Markup Language (HTML):
Working and Background Materials." October 1994.
<URL:http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/
MarkUp.html>
[Bern94b] T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter, M. McCahill (eds),
"Uniform Resource Locators (URL)." Internet Draft.
October 1994.
<URL:ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/
draft-ietf-uri-url-08.txt>
[Weid94] C. Weider, P. Deutsch, "Uniform Resource Names."
Internet Draft. July 1994.
<URL:ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/
draft-ietf-uri-resource-names-02.txt>

7. Author's Address

Martin Hamilton

Department of Computer Studies,
Loughborough University of Technology,
Leics. LE11 3TU, UK
<martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>

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