From: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu>
To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
Subject: Re: Mailserver URL proposal
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 21 Jul 1994 15:37:44 PDT."
<94Jul21.153755pdt.2760@golden.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 14:00:05 -0500
Message-Id: <28727.774903605@moose.cs.indiana.edu>
Thus wrote: Larry Masinter
>a) Is it vaguely possible to extend 'mailto:' to cover both its
>current interpretation and also the mailserver case?
This seems reasonable to me...
>I'm actually not at all certain that the mailserver case should follow
>the generic 'login' syntax; the host names in mail addresses are MX
>hostnames, not A records, and the rules about connectivity and proxy
>and etc. are all different.
>
>Why not just have:
> mailto:president@whitehouse.gov
>mean:
> send mail to president@whitehouse.gov
>
>while:
> mailto:president@whitehouse.gov/dear%20bill/Greetings%20from%20a%20web%20us
>er.
One would like to see something a little more general as far as
headers go, but something like that should work.
>b) Is it vaguely possible to extend 'telnet:' URLs to cover some
>initial material to send to the telnet connection?
>
> telnet://lambda.parc.xerox.com:8888/connect%20guest
>
>means 'telnet to lambda.parc.xerox.com port 888 and type 'connect
>guest'?
Modulo obvious security concerns, of course. :-) Ideally you want to
be able to negotiate an arbitrarily complex interactive session the
way you can with expect. Using an expect-enhanced version of Safe-Tcl
with the URL pointing to the program is probably a better way to do
this, though.
A generic request-response URL also could be of some use for handling
generic, simple services like whois and finger; not sure what to name
it, so I'll call it "foo". Something like
foo://whois.host:43/smith,john
foo://some.host:79/jsumer%20%2FW
would be "whois" and "finger" queries respectively. This, too, has
significant security concerns, though it doesn't really give any
functionality that it's already possible through kludging the "gopher"
URL.
- Marc
-- <A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html">Marc VanHeyningen</A>