# Re: <'s for URLs

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Mon, 18 Oct 93 09:48:08 -0700

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    Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 09:48:08 -0700

    From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

    Message-Id: <9310181648.AA12444@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>

    To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

    Subject: Re: <'s for URLs

    In-Reply-To: <9310180911.AA01294@www3.cern.ch>

Tim Berners-Lee writes:
> > From: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>
> > Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 09:47:29 PDT
> >
> >But as soon as I convert unstructured text into HTML, perhaps by
> >cutting and pasting, these angle brackets become dangerous. Any
> >other characters would do better, even &.
>
> Whenever you paste plain ascii into SGML you have to
> replace certain characters (<>&) with entities.
>
> And you shouldn't even be aware that it has done it: you
> should see the < and the > still.
> If your editing environment doesn't do it for you now,
> it certainly ought to be doing it next year.

That theory isn't working -- it has to be assumed people will be
creating, handling, manipulating, converting, and tweaking data (text,
HTML, whatever) by hand. Experience is showing that every day.

This really is unnecessary confusion, easily avoidable by not
overloading the same characters SGML (and, for that matter, email
addresses) uses.

Marc

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