Re: [EAI] [Fwd: AD review of draft-duerst-mailto-bis-06.txt]

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>]

Currently lots of software seem to just allow Unicode in the mailto:  (Or actually convert it based on the encoding of the web page).  I'm not going to argue whether that's "correct" or not, but it does seem to be the prevailing current practice.

From the experience with IDN where non-ASCII values are being directly encoded in http, I think it's unrealistic that all mailto: URIs will be "correctly" % escaped.  On the contrary, I think most probably won't be.

So I'd like the mailto-bis to allow that applications MAY recognize unescaped UTF-8 in UTF-8 documents.

-Shawn

P.S: Yes, "lots" includes Microsoft software since it's easy to play with.  On my machine if I open "run", then type mailto:shäwn, then Outlook opens up with shäwn in the To: line.  Same thing happens if I stick it in an href in an HTML document.  I think I even tried it with a different browser (sorry, don't remember which one, don't have others installed at the moment).  Of course I couldn't actually send the mail, but the "mailto" part worked.