Re: imap URL's

["Steven D. Majewski" <[e-mail]>]

On Jun 17, 13:46, John Gardiner Myers wrote:
> 
> "Steven D. Majewski" <[e-mail]> writes:
> >         imap://[userid@]host.name/mbox[other] 
> 
> The format I suggested way back had "other" required to be a UID.
> 

	imap://[e-mail] 

would be more consistant with the common practice of:

	ftp://[e-mail]

And in fact, draft-ietf-uri-url-03.{ps,txt} 
<URL: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/url-spec.txt>
says that an optional user name is a part of the internet protocol 
part:


|    Internet protocol parts  
|
|   Those schemes which refer to internet protocols mostly have a
|   common syntax for the rest of the object name. This starts with a
|   double slash "//" to indicate its presence, and continues until the
|   following slash "/".  Within that section are   
|
|  An optional user name, 
|                          if required (as it is with a few FTP
|                         servers). The password, is present, follows
|                         the user name, separated from it by a colon;
|                         the user name and optional password are
|                         followed by a commercial at sign "@".  The
|                         user of user name and passwords which are
|                         public is discouraged. 
|
|
|  The internet domain name 
|                          of the host in RFC1037 format (or,
|                         optionally and less advisably, the IP address
|                         as a set of four decimal digits) 
|


The above seems to suggest that the ftp: format is "the common format"
which any other protocol URL should follow. 

>
> Mailbox names can have slashes and/or question marks, so you have to
> be careful about ambiguity problems.
> 

And I think it's pretty clear that "?" is reserved in the URL syntax 
for indicating search strings, so IF a mailbox does in fact have a
"?" char, it will have to be escaped. 


---

Slashes to delimit "other", though, may be a problem. 
( i.e. I didn't expect any disagreement on the other parts, above. 
  It was the syntax and semantics for the trailing other that I 
  wasn't sure about. :-) 

I initially thought it should be: 
	imap://userid@hostname/mbox#message-id 

But I think that reserving "#" to point to a point IN a message 
( perhaps different sections of a MIME message ) is more in the
spirit of current URL usage. 


Using only slashes as delimiters for both mailboxes and message 
selectors may be ambiguous to a human reader, but not necessarily
to server software: When the first part of a url path resolves to
a mailbox name, the the rest MUST be a selector. ( But I wouldn't 
be unhappy to hear a good argument for a better choice of delimiter) 


The other "common practice" that would remove ambiguity, is that 
a trailing "/" is usually mapped to an index of some sort. 
( http: maps to the default index file, ftp: maps it to a directory
listing, rather than a file. ), so "mbox/" SHOULD mean an index
of the mailbox contents, and "mbox/anything" should be a selection
IN than mailbox. "mbox" can itself contain slashes without ambiguity. 


What I am confused about is that there is a URL type reserved for 
mid: (message-id) and cid: ( MIME content id ), but no indication
how these could be subsidiary to news: ( or in this case, a 
proposed imap: url. ) 


- Steve Majewski       (804-982-0831)      <[e-mail]>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics

[ I don't know where to CC this for URL discussion, but if I find 
  out, I'll repost it there too. ]