Mailto: URL's and other things

montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu (Lou Montulli)

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From: montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu (Lou Montulli)
Message-id: <9310010030.AA13183@stat1.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Mailto: URL's and other things
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 19:30:00 CDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL2]

For those of you who currently support mailto: URL's and those
of you adding it, I have a suggestion. 

I (Lynx) has been including the URL of the document that the message was
sent from within the subject, but I realized that there is a much better 
way.  We should agree upon an "x-" header and always include the
URL as part of the message header.  Something like "x-within-URL:"

The reason that this is important is that many times a mailto: URL
will be used within <link rev=made> tags which specify the owner
of the document.  A user can then send a comment directly to
the document owner from within the Web browser.  The only problem
is that a lot messages look like this:

    You misspelled the word "unique" on line 5 of this file.

If the URL is not included by the browser, the recipient of the 
message has little chance of finding the document in question if
they maintain a large number.

Another useful thing that could be done when knowing the URL is
to use mailto: links as a primitive query mechanisim.  A file
might say: click here and send us your home address for a 
free copy by mail.  Since the URL is included a program can uniquely
identify the product to be mailed.  A commonly known x- resource
header is needed for a program to scan the correct header for the URL.

I would like to hear other suggestions on how this should be done if
there is a better way.  I would also like to hear some people come up with
a better x header, since I came up with "x-within-URL" with
about 2 seconds of continuous thought.

:lou
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