Do you really think that users would understand better if they read "abuse-mailbox: user@example.com" instead of that sentence in english which explains what the allocation is for and who should be notified of abuse?
Actually, yes. The only class of users for which equivalence is reasonable is humans who are competent in English. Non-human users (such as automated reporting tools), and to some extent non-anglophone humans, can be expected to have problems.
Maybe RIPE could provide a web page to query the DB for abuse desk addresses (which would report no other data),
Not a web page. Please, not a web page! If you _must_ use a web page, please cast the query and response formats in stone so that the result is scriptable. (Actually, there's nothing wrong with providing a human-friendly web interface per se. What I have a problem with is providing no automation-friendly interface. There is a strong tendency these days to consider a webpage as enough for all purposes, which it usually isn't.)
So far only one tool writer contributed to this thread, and he reported that both abuse-mailbox and irt could be used by his tools.
I'm a tool writer, though I haven't written any tools for this, largely because there is so little standardization among the various IP registries on query and response formats, and so many netblocks use human-targeted "remarks:" or equivalent to provide critical info. I would love it if we had something like abuse-mailbox:, especially if it had buyin from other IP registries (ARIN, registro.br, KRNIC, etc). Whether it actually is abuse-mailbox: or the IRT stuff is more or less irrelevant to me; buyin from others, quick deployment, and a format specified clearly enough to make queries automatable are much more important to me than the details of the spec. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B