[Sigia-l] Alternatives to long string URLs for e-mail linking

[Jan Egil Hagen]

* Stephen Holmes <sholmes at labyrinth.net.au>
| Long strings mean that the traditional 70 or 80 character e-mail
| width was not big enough to hold a URL, so only the first line would
| be converted to an active link by a user's e-mail client. I use N7,
| for instance which handles an e-mail according to the settings of
| the client that sent the message - some wrap, some don't.

RFC 1738 tackled this problem in December 1994:

   In addition, there are many occasions when URLs are included in
   other kinds of text; examples include electronic mail, USENET news
   messages, or printed on paper. In such cases, it is convenient to
   have a separate syntactic wrapper that delimits the URL and
   separates it from the rest of the text, and in particular from
   punctuation marks that might be mistaken for part of the URL. For
   this purpose, is recommended that angle brackets ("<" and ">"),
   along with the prefix "URL:", be used to delimit the boundaries of
   the URL.  This wrapper does not form part of the URL and should not
   be used in contexts in which delimiters are already specified.

   In some cases, extra whitespace (spaces, linebreaks, tabs, etc.)
   may need to be added to break long URLs across lines.  The
   whitespace should be ignored when extracting the URL.

So the _correct_ solution is to write <URL:http://long.url>.  Writing
urls any other way should be considered extremely impolite, especially
on mailing lists with many readers.

| Often users didn't know that they could manually copy and paste a
| URL from an e-mail and so when they click on that first line link
| they get an error message or - if the webmaster is on the ball - a
| redirect to a help page.

As important is the waste of time when 200 users of a mailing list
have to manually copy and paste instead of just
click. <http://long.url> is a microsoftism, has badly defined
semantics, and should be avoided.

A few examples:

   <URL:http://www.  
   bogieland 
   .com/infodesign/>

   <URL:http://www.        bogieland       .com/infodesign/>

   <URL:http://www.bogieland.com/infodesign/>

Please note that _all_ urls should be written like this, not just long
ones.

-- 
   World works; done by its invalids