Re: IMAP URL scheme <draft-newman-url-imap-05.txt>

> I'd like to review "draft-newman-url-imap-05.txt" against
> "draft-masinter-url-process-00.txt", as much to ask
> "are the criteria adequate or too restrictive" as "do imap URLs fit?".
> 
> 2.1: syntactic compatibility
> The only other URL schemes that access "message in repository" are
> "news" and "nntp". I suppose IMAP doesn't have any way to reference a
> message by its message ID, although NNTP does by its message number
> within a news group.
> 
> The section 8 exception for "relative IMAP URLs" is just unacceptable.
> I'm skeptical that "IMAP4 permits the use of any hierarchy delimiter
> in mailbox names" is a good idea. We avoided this in "file:" and think
> the same arguments apply here.

I'm also skeptical about this.  The URL paradigm is to use '/' as the
hierarchy delimiter regardless of what delimiter is used in the
protocol itself (or on the file server).  Code that deals with
relative URLs wants to able to be independent of URL-type.  

The IMAP URL proposal sort of solves this problem by imposing the
restriction that you can only use mailbox-relative IMAP URLs for
mailboxes whose hierarchy delimiter is '/', but this seems like an
undesirable restriction.  Is this restriction preferable to having '/'
in an IMAP URL translated to whatever hierarchy delimiter is used by
the mailboxes?

For instance, could the IMAP hierarchy delimiter be embedded in the
IMAP URL itself, say in the character immediately following the '/'
after the domain name?

So:

imap://domain/.#news/comp/mail/misc/
imap://domain//inbox/Jan97/
imap://domain/%5COFFICE/SYSTEM/



Keith