Re: METHODS and TITLE

David Morris (dwm@shell.portal.com)
Tue, 20 Jun 95 15:53:52 EDT

On Tue, 20 Jun 1995, Larry Masinter wrote:

> There is a proposal for a 'mailserver:' URL that would allow the
> inclusion of message subject & body.
>
> ftp://nic.merit.edu/internet/documents/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-url-mailserver-01.txt

Well, there are surely more general approaches then inventing yet another
encoding scheme for this particular url. Surely, it would be better to
specify the subject etc as url-encoded as in a query url with two named
fields Subject= and Body=; require masking of %0a and %0d found in the
subject; skip the special new user of /. So as it stands, I don't
see much value in the technique proposed in the referenced draft.

> I'd prefer to see additional information about actions to be performed
> by a link be incorporated in the syntax of links, so that links from
> PDF and VRML would also have the same capabilities, if they're
> necessary.

Unless there is a cleaner, easier to describe and implement alternative
for the HTML context, etc.. While we needn't make life difficult
intentionally for PDF, VRML, RTF, etc., there is no reason why their
full participation in the WWW shouldn't require cooperation from
their side.

Dave Morris