[whatwg] [WF2] action="mailto:" - encoding spaces

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Michael A. Puls II wrote:
> 
> I'm talking about a UA associating mailto: links and mailto: form 
> submission with webmail clients (like Gmail for example) by whatever 
> means, just like UAs can do with Thunderbird for example.
> 
> This could be done with registerProtocolHandler, but the webmail would 
> have to accept a uri= in its compose URI query string and the function 
> (at least the internal one) couldn't be domain-restricted.
> 
> Gmail (and most webmails) currently don't support a uri=, but I have a 
> specific proposal for Gmail if I can find someone to submit it to.

GMail supports registerProtocolHandler, just use:

   https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s


> Anyway, goto 
> <http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/register_protocol_handler.html> 
> and click on the first link. If Gmail worked like that, it could totally 
> work around the '+' issue and support a registerProtocolHandler-like 
> function. Of course, Gmail could simply not decode + to ' ' for its to, 
> cc, bcc, body and su hvalues that it currently supports. Then though, 
> there'd still be a bunch of other webmails that'd need to do it also. 
> But, take a look at the source of the pages and the included JS. They 
> show the things that are necessary to implement parsing in a compatible 
> way and will help with your following question.

I'm very confused. registerProtocolHandler() says to escape the mailto: 
URL, so no "+" characters make it through.

If a tool is processing a mailto: URL manually converting it to an HTTP 
URL, then it has to escape "+" characters too.


> > Could you lay out the steps that take us from a form submission using a
> > mailto: URL to an HTTPS request to GMail?
> 
> Maybe this will help:
> 
> Download <http://shadow2531.com/opera/userjs/BeforeMailtoURL.js> to a folder.
> Edit it and set supportForms to true.
> 
> In Opera, goto tools -> preferences -> advanced -> content -> javascript
> options and set your UserJS folder to the folder BeforeMailtoURL.js is in.
> 
> Log in to <http://mail.google.com/>.
> 
> Goto <http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/003-post.html> and
> <http://shadow2531.com/opera/testcases/mailto/003.html> and click compose.
> 
> In BeforeMailtoURL.js, you can look at
> "createMailtoURIFromEnabledFormControls(form)", "if (supportForms)", the
> MailtoURIParser class and the format() function. And, look at the "if
> (form.method == "post")" part to see how I convert '+' to "%2B" in the action
> attribute to avoid this problem. (Note that the way I parse the form isn't
> complete. Wish: Forms should have a generateDataset() so UAs can do if for
> you.)

Right, if you convert a mailto: URL to an http: URL, you have to convert 
the bytes to be in the right format. So what? That's not a bug, it's what 
happens when you have different semantics in different formats and you 
translate from one to another.


> So, as a suggestion:
> 
> On the authoring side, making <form action="mailto:?subject=1+2" 
> method="post"> invalid and <form action="mailto:?subject=1%2B2" 
> method="post"> valid would help.

That would be a change to the mailto: URL scheme, which is out of scope 
for HTML5.


> On a handling side for "mailto:", saying the UA should convert the + to 
> %2B *if* the submitted data will end up in an http URI, might help.

As far as I can tell, the spec already says that for all cases where this 
might happen.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'