Message-Id: <199410221218.NAA03652@lust.mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
To: uri@bunyip.com
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 13:18:12 +0100
From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
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Content-ID: <3649.782828291.1@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
Here's a use for URIs which I'd like to run by you...
Please let me know if you can see any reasons why this is a bad idea
or doesdn't work !
Cheerio,
Martin
PS There is even an implementation!! This is a little patch for exmh
(Tcl/Tk front end to MH) - send me mail for a copy
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Content-ID: <3649.782828291.2@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
Content-Description: X-URIs blurb
URIs (well, currently URLs) make a great out-of-bound mechanism for
communicating personal contact information. We're already seeing a lot
of people including URLs in their e-mail/Usenet signatures. A slight
formalisation of the current approach would provide an simple and elegant
mechanism for including out-of-bound contact info at very little extra
implementation cost for mail and news reader programs
Programs which want to send references to URIs should create an extra
RFC822 header, say "X-URI:", the right hand side of which contains a URI
specified by the message originator and encoded as per the plaintext
encoding rules for URLs, e.g.
X-URI: <URL:http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html>
Many existing mailers and news readers provide the functionality to add
custom headers like this
Programs which want to make use of this info should provide their users
with the option of launching an appropriate tool pointing at the
specified URI, e.g.
URL:http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
in the above example
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.
Mosaic http://some.domain/me/my_home_page.html
Any whitespace included in the X-URI: header should be removed before
the URI is passed to the viewer, e.g.
X-URI: <URL:ftp://some.very.long.domain.name/an/even_longer_path_
than_before.html>
would be whitespace-stripped as
URL:ftp://some.very.long.domain.name/an/even_longer_path_than_before.html
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