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

Jon P. Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk)
Thu, 15 Sep 1994 15:00:51 +0100 (BST)

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    Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 15:00:51 +0100 (BST)

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

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

    To: Chris Weider <clw@mocha.bunyip.com>

    In-Reply-To: <9409151118.AA23497@mocha.bunyip.com>

    Message-Id: <Pine.3.05.9409151550.F17598-c100000@suna>

On Thu, 15 Sep 1994, Chris Weider wrote:
> 1: Highly recommending the anchor syntax (with surrounding <A> and </A>)
> for all URLs quoted in free text. This allows the immediate display of any
> text based document (with the appropriate semantics) through Mosaic.

Ugh, no plesae! The <URL:...> is a wrapper for *plain* text; lets not
start slipping bits of pseudo HTML/SGML in there. There are enough
non-conforming HTML documents out there already without Internet standards
making things worse by recommending that people stick little bits of HTML
in their plain text, but miss out all the important stuff like the
headers. Plain text is plain text and HTML is HTML. <URL:...> wouldn't
ever appear in an HTML document (it would either become an HREF attribute
to an <A> tag or the < and > would be replaced by the corresponding SGML
character entities (&lt; and &gt;)

> 2: The development of a new tag, call it URI, for example,
> <uri ref="http:blah/blah/blah"> and highly recommending its use. This is
> perhaps less general, but is a fairly useful hack in my opinion, and allows
> all types of references to be placed inside.

You say ``tag''; do you mean a new HTML/SGML tag or just a new way of
wrapping URLs in plain text? If the former, I must ask why its needed
seeing as we already have <A> (and, as I said above, I don't think we
should encourage the ``pollution'' plain text with HTML and vice versa).
If the later, I must ask why it is better than just
<URL:http:blah/blah/blah> seeing as it takes up more characters and is
likely to suffer from many of the same objections as <URL:...> has?

> In either case, I hope that I've convinced you of the necessity of a wrapper.

I am convinced of the necessity of <URL:...> style wrappers. However, I
beginning to think that *no* plain text wrappers specified in the document
might be a better idea and then just let those of us who like <URL:...>
use it, hoping that it gains momentum with time. It would be nice to have
it in the document, but if its going to mean another couple of months
delay, for goodness sake drop it and put it in a two page Internet Draft
of its own.

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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