Re: Editorial comments on HTML 2.0 Draft 3/31/95

Paul Burchard (burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu)
Wed, 19 Apr 95 12:15:31 EDT

lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk> writes:
> > Something else...what's the bit about "e-mail" doing in there?
> > HTML 2.0 doesn't support mailto FORMs.
>
> Why was that design decision made? Current browsers are
> able to support mailto forms, it is after all a valid
> access protocol - even if Mosaic has only just finally
> started supporting it ;-)

At the time the 2.0 feature set was determined, mailto forms were
not yet widely supported. Also, I seem to remember some lingering
debate about what the default encoding of form data in mail should
be.

In any case, this is an area that needs to be factored out of the
HTML spec for 3.0. This belongs instead in the mythical WWW User
Agent spec, as part of its general (format-independent) discussion
about the semantics and structure of WWW links. This deserves some
serious thought, because the link model provided by the Web is
currently very primitive.

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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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