Re: mailto: with Body part broken (was: Re: [Evolution] Three small questions about Evolution)

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

> > > I can't say that Evo's behaviour is strictly wrong, since all it's doing
> > > is what Firefox is telling it, i.e. create a message with a given Body.
> > > The Evo developers could argue that adding an extra line in Normal
> > > format is exceeding the spec.
> >
> > It would be nothing more than adding a newline at the end of the given
> > Body string.
>
> Of course, but standards lawyers will say it's still a change, so maybe
> it should be optional.

If they do, they are wrong. ;-)  This is not claimed by the standard.
See below.


> > > It's what I want in this case, but is it
> > > always what I want? Neither can we ask Firefox to know about Evo's
> > > formatting features.
> >
> > True.
> >
> > > One solution would be an extra Evo command line option to allow callers
> > > to ask for strict/nonstrict inclusion of the body text.
> >
> > Don't think this will work, since mailto: is some kind of a standard,
> > implemented by Browsers and MUAs all over the place.
>
> Yes, according to Google it's RFC2368, and there isn't any obvious way
> of making it do what we want.

Oh, I didn't know there is a RFC. Good catch, Patrick. :)


> Seems to me the alternatives are:
[...]

I beg to differ. :)  I just read that whole RFC, neither the format nor
any additional text is mentioned -- apart from a claim that "The user
can edit the message". So it's the responsibility of the MUA to chose a
sane paragraph format (if it actually supports multiple) and to add
additional text -- at least the signature and a newline does make sense.

According to the RFC it is totally legitimate for the MUA, to add a
newline char to the body given in the URL.


Regarding the paragraph style (Normal vs. Preformat), both make sense in
different cases:

* Sending long URLs (the original example) wraps with "Normal", but is
  fine with "Preformat".
* Giving a short natural language text [1] for the body is fine with
  "Normal", but is ugly and unwanted with "Preformat".

It can be hard to determine the correct (or at least best) paragraph
style for *all* cases possible. But with a newline at the end of the
given body string and using "Normal" at least for the second line where
the *user* is supposed to enter text, we get a better solution than we
do have now.

...guenther


[1] mailto:user host com?body=Please%20describe%20the%20issue%20you\%20encountered%20in%20SMART-APP 
%20We%20will%20get%20back%20to%20you%20as%20soo\n%20as%20possible 


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0  ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}