technically speaking, this is just another update of the SMS URI scheme draft (this time to version draft-wilde-sms-uri-19
after submitting versions 18 and 17 earlier this month), but it's going into IETF last call now and it seems that all comments were successfully resolved. there is one lingering issue around whether the optional body text in an SMS URI should have Unicode normalization rules defined for it, but i think it shouldn't. it is up to the software composing the actual SMS message to make sure that any normalization rules are being followed (and i am still a bit unclear if there are any; it seems that there aren't). what happens before that can be any kind of Unicode as long as it's valid Unicode, at least that is what i think makes most sense.
i hope that the optimistic title is not much too optimistic, but it definitely would be great to see this finally being finished. i just checked and realized that version 00 of that draft was published in december 2001, so this really has been under construction for quite a while. the delay was partly caused by some confusion around the IETF URI scheme registration rules and procedures, and around the IETF specification for how to represent telephone numbers, but mostly, it was just me getting sidetracked by other things. i hope this time it's really sufficient to go to RFC, and then, i hope, straight into mobile browser implementations!
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