EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 47 of 120

Correct — B, (b) mailto:. A hyperlink in a web page is an anchor element whose href attribute holds a uniform resource identifier, and the first part of that identifier — everything before the colon — is the SCHEME, which tells the browser what kind of resource it is dealing with and therefore what to do when the link is clicked. For an ordinary web page the scheme is http or https. For an electronic mail address it is mailto, so the attribute reads mailto: followed immediately by the address, with no slashes in between. Written out, a link that opens a new message to an office address looks like an anchor whose href is mailto: joined to the address, with the visible link text between the opening and closing anchor tags. Clicking it does not fetch anything over the network. The browser hands the address to whatever program the operating system has registered as the default handler for mail, which opens a fresh message with the To field already filled in. The scheme also accepts extra header fields after the address, introduced by a question mark and separated by ampersands — a subject line, copy and blind copy addresses, and even a body — which is how a 'contact us' link can arrive pre-labelled with the department it concerns. Two limitations are worth knowing because they are the usual complaints against such links. If the machine has no mail program configured as the default handler, clicking does nothing visible, which is common on shared and public terminals where web mail is used instead. And because the address sits in plain text in the page source, automated harvesters collect it, which is why many organisations publish a contact form rather than a mailto link.

• (a)mail: — A plausible shortening that is not the registered scheme name. Scheme names are not guessed by the browser or matched loosely — they are exact strings, and a browser that meets an identifier whose scheme it does not recognise has no handler to pass it to, so the link either does nothing or is misread as a path within the same site. This is the option that catches a candidate reasoning from meaning rather than from memory, since 'mail' is the more natural English word and the scheme is deliberately the longer one.
• (c)tomail: — An invented scheme built by putting the To of an addressed message in front of the word mail. It is worth noticing what the real scheme does with the same idea: mailto reads as 'mail to', with the destination sense carried by the ending rather than the beginning. Nothing in the web standards defines tomail, so a browser meeting it has no handler and the link is inert.
• (d)to_mail: — Invented, and disqualified twice over. Besides not being a defined scheme, it breaks the rule about how scheme names may be spelt: a scheme begins with a letter and may then contain only letters, digits, the plus sign, the hyphen and the full stop. An underscore is not permitted anywhere in a scheme name, so this string could not be a scheme even if somebody wanted to register it. That rule is a quick filter on any question of this shape.

Every hyperlink is a uniform resource identifier, and its scheme decides the behaviour. Fetching schemes send a request over the network — http and https for web pages, ftp for file transfer — while a handler scheme hands the rest of the identifier to a program on the local machine. mailto is the best known handler scheme: it carries an electronic mail address and, optionally, header fields such as a subject line or copy addresses appended after a question mark. tel does the same for a telephone number, which is why a number on a page can be tapped to dial on a mobile device. file addresses a document on the local disc rather than on a server. The syntax differs in a way that is easy to miss and often examined: http and https are followed by a colon and two solidi because they name a host, whereas mailto is followed by a colon alone, because an electronic mail address already contains its own host after the at sign and needs no separate authority component.

The computers block of the EO/AO paper favours items whose answer an officer would know from using a browser rather than from studying networking, and this is one of them. All four options are the same shape, so the item is a straight recall test with no reasoning route in — which is exactly why the underlying rule about scheme names is worth carrying: it eliminates one option on sight and narrows the guess. The habit rewarded is learning the exact spelling of the handful of schemes that appear in ordinary work, since near-miss spellings are what the wrong options are made of.

• An electronic mail hyperlink is written with the mailto scheme in the href attribute of an anchor element, followed by a colon and the address.
• Clicking the link opens the machine's default mail program with the To field filled in; it does not send a network request to a web server.
• Header fields such as subject, copy and blind copy can be appended after a question mark and separated by ampersands.
• http and https are followed by a colon and two solidi because they name a host; mailto is followed by a colon only.
• A scheme name must begin with a letter and may contain only letters, digits, plus, hyphen and full stop — never an underscore.
• If no default mail program is configured, a mailto link does nothing visible.
• Addresses published in mailto links are readable in the page source and are collected by automated harvesters.
• Related handler schemes include tel for telephone numbers and file for documents on the local machine.

• Writing two solidi after mailto by analogy with http, which breaks the identifier.
• Choosing the shorter and more natural-sounding scheme name over the defined one.
• Assuming a mailto link sends the message itself — it only composes one for the user to send.
• Forgetting that an underscore can never appear in a scheme name, which rules out one option without any recall at all.

Web and internet items in EO/AO papers cluster around three things: markup syntax, address and protocol names, and the vocabulary of electronic mail — copy, blind copy, attachment, spam, and the difference between a client and web mail. Questions are recall-shaped with near-miss distractors, so precision of spelling matters more than depth of understanding.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In a uniform resource locator, the part that appears before the colon is called the :

  • (a)Domain name
  • (b)Scheme
  • (c)Path
  • (d)Query string

  Answer(b) Scheme

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In an electronic mail message, an address placed in the blind copy field is :

  • (a)Visible to all other recipients
  • (b)Visible only to the addressees in the To field
  • (c)Not visible to the other recipients of the message
  • (d)Automatically removed before the message is sent

  Answer(c) Not visible to the other recipients of the message