Mailto: URL's and other things

Lou Montulli (montulli@stat1.cc.ukans.edu)
Thu, 30 Sep 93 19:30:00 CDT


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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