chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk (Charles Lindsey) writes:
What I am after is the regularisation of the present practice whereby
software attempts to recognise URLs when it finds them in the midst of
text/plain (usually by recognising anything starting with "www." or
enclosed in <...>).
One can visualise a situation where, with a suitable "format=url"
parameter to text/plain, one could say that conforming software SHOULD
recognise anything of the form "<xxx:.....>" as a URL, and MAY attempt to
recognise other cases. One might provide restrictions on what "xxx" could
be ("url" and "uri" would be the minimal candidates, obviously).
Isn't the text in an appendix of RFC1738 (which I quoted earlier in
this thread) sufficient to solve this problem?
Recommending mail client implementators to support it inside
text/plain parts would reach the same goal as defining a "format=url"
flag, without the hassle of introducing a new flag. If mail client
implementators wouldn't implement the recommendation, they probably
wouldn't implement a "format=url" flag either.