mailto: URLs are rather boring in comparison with http: you have a point, most mailto: URLs in the wild are straight forward and simple. But the syntax specified in
RFC 2368 was based onUpdating the mailto: specification therefore had to replace the old (and tricky) RFC 822 syntax by the new
RFC 5234 ABNF in STD 68 published 26 years later (2008). The actual content of RFC 822 is the Internet Message Format as used in e-mail and now specified in
RFC 5322, the successor of RFC 2822.
For URIs we are now at STD 66 in
RFC 3986 (2005) with various subtle differences from the eleven years older RFC 1738. You won't often see these differences, but clearly there was no such thing as IPv6 in URIs back in 1994. UTF-8 was rarely used, supported 31bit Unicode points, and permitted "overlong" encodings — not exactly the STD 63 rules in
RFC 3629 (2003) we use today.The general syntax for URIs in STD 66 and the specific syntax of e-mail addresses in RFC 5322 are not directly compatible, some characters permitted in addresses are not permitted "as is" in URIs and have to be "percent-encoded" based on the hex. UTF-8 encoding. It's a miracle that the new mailto: URI specification in
RFC 6068 managed to close these gaps in 2010, twelve years after RFC 2368. There are lots of interesting examples in RFC 6068, my favourite is a clever use of In-Reply-To e-mail header fields. The complicated examples are also fascinating. If you create a complicated e-mail address your chances that it works anywhere in a mailto: URLs are now better. Well, at least it is specified, implementing it at the interface of browsers and mail user agents is another story. Well done, one "like" from me to RFC 6068.
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