> On Wed, 29 Jan 1997 18:27:47 -0800 (PST), Terry Carroll
<carroll@tjc.com> wrote:
>
> > Which RFC is that?
>
> 1738
Thanks. The URL RFC. Duh. I was looking at the HTML RFC.
> I agree; also, the RFC gives me the impression that the URL: prefix is
> just a recommendation for when there could be confusion about what
> type of URI or other, uh, gizmo you're dealing with. Still, they use
> this notation consistently in the RFC, too.
Yes, looking at the RFC, it does seem to be a mere recommendation. I hate
it, though.
I don't think there's any reason to suspect that a user would be unable to
recognize http://someurl.somewhere.com as a URL while being able to
recognize <URL:http://someurl.somewhere.com>. The only reasonable basis
supplied is that a trailing period or other punctuation may be ambiguous
as to whether it's part of the URL. (Although I must admit my own way of
dealing with this is rather ugly, too: I put a space before the period.)
For those interested, here's the pertinent excerpt from the RFC:
In some cases, it will be necessary to distinguish URLs from other
possible data structures in a syntactic structure. In this case, is
recommended that URLs be preceeded with a prefix consisting of the
characters "URL:". For example, this prefix may be used to
distinguish URLs from other kinds of URIs.
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.
I think that the last sentence's exception swallows the whole: in most
contexts, simple whitespace provides delimitation, making the
angle-brackets and "URL" redundantly superfluous.
-- Terry Carroll | "Al Gore is doing for the federal government what Santa Clara, CA | he did for the Macarena. He's removing all the carroll@tjc.com | unnecessary steps." Modell delenda est | - Bill Clinton, September 20, 1996
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