Mailing documents

See also: other projects, posting to news, linking into frozen documents

Requirements

This is related to the news posting project ., which should be done at the same time or earlier.

A requiremnent is to be able to mail hypertext using the following operations identical to the news posting interface

Mail address object

A new object is deisgned, a mail address, which corresponds to a URL of the "mailto:" form. In the initial stage, this may be just a small window containing the name, email address, and optional picture etc. If mail indexing software is also available, then the mailbox object could include embedded ot have a link to a list of all messages to and from that person.

The semantics of the mail address object are that making a link from it to a given object sends the object by mail to that address. This is represented by adding the object to the list of objects sent to the object.

Note that the mail address object referred to here is different from a mailbox or folder in most mail appliations. It represents an address, rather than a folder.

Note also of course that the view of a mail address for any given user will be different, in that the system will be able to determine different information about that object on the user's behalf.

Linking to frozen documents

Mail and news articles are frozen once they are posted. One can therefore make links to specific lines or characters in them, by given an anchor name which is a line or character count. A good solid unambiguous specification of this for arbitrary MIME messages would be needed. The plain text object would have to be extended to allow this form of anchor to be generated.

A possible interesting intermediate form of object is a plain text object which uses link/char count ranges for anchor names,. and which allows outgoing links which are stored in the rfc8222 style object metainformation. The same applies to anchors in images such as GIFs or even videos. The anchor shape should be defined in a

Tim BL