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

["Patrick O'Callaghan" <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 23:41 +0100, guenther wrote:
> > > > 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.

Could be. I didn't read it that carefully.

> 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.

Absolutely.

poc