# Re: <URL:...> considered harmful

Jon P. Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk)
Tue, 13 Sep 1994 08:48:14 +0100 (BST)

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    Date: Tue, 13 Sep 1994 08:48:14 +0100 (BST)

    From: "Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>

    Subject: Re: <URL:...> considered harmful

    To: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>

    In-Reply-To: <9409122013.AA02543@ulua.hal.com>

    Message-Id: <Pine.3.05.9409130813.A7243-b100000@suna>

On Mon, 12 Sep 1994, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
> Each piece of software that basically looks for "scheme:..." will have
> to have a special case to check to see if scheme: is URL:, and skip it
> if so.

Bogus argument: if the software is scanning plain text for schemes and
skips over URL:, it also will have skip over lots of places where
sentences end in semicolons:

Like this one.

However it does help point the URL out for human readers, or for making
sure that URLs that are extracted are really intented to be pulled out (so
that we can talk about http://somewhere.com/burp.html in www-talk without
the super new plain text URL extraction software pulling out this duff URL).

> In practice, I find that the most reliable way to communicate a URL in
> plain text is to put it on a line by itself, preferably with a little
> whitespace on each side, e.g.:
>
> ftp://cnri.reston.va.us/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-url-07.txt
>
> That it is a URL is self-evident, or given by context.

I never used to like <URL:....> but since I've started sticking URLs in
bibliographies in printed papers, I've come to appreciate the syntax. The
`<' and `>' server to delimit the (possible multi-line) URL, and the URL:
identifies the string as being a URL which can be passed to a WWW browser
or used with other NIR software. After all there are plenty of people in
Computer Science who still wouldn't recognise a URL as a URL unless it was
pointed out to them. As it doesn't seem to do any real harm by including
it, why not just leave it.

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* It's not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important *

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