Re: IMAP URLs

[Chris Newman <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 18 Nov 1996, Martin J Duerst wrote:
> The second problem is somewhat more basic: If you want to change
> a list of parameters, how do you indicate the absence of a parameter?
> One possibility would be to indicate the parameter again, with an
> empty value, but in some cases, an empty parameter value and the
> complete absence of the parameter will not mean the same.

That is a problem.

> Therefore, it looks very much like the specification for not
> partially inheriting parameters as in RFC 1808 makes a lot of
> sence, and is definitely not a bug, even if in some cases,
> it may not exactly be optimal.

Where the problem comes with IMAP URLs is the ;AUTH= parameter used to
specify an authentication mechanism.  This would almost always need to be
copied to relative URLs, whereas the ;UIDVALIDITY= and the ;UID=
parameters would be much less likely to be copied to a relative URL.

Now if there were some way for me to put the AUTH= in with the <login>
part of the URL, it would be a lot cleaner, but I can't think of a good
syntax.  I'd also say that as we move away from cleartext passwords, it
may become more important to specify authentication mechanisms in URLs in
general.