> URLs are meant to be read by machines.
FAQs are meant to be read by humans. When URLs are in FAQs, those URLs
are meant to be read by humans.
> Anything that detracts from
> those machines' ability to unambiguously parse them is a mistake, IMO.
I'm more in the camp that anything that detracts from those humans'
ability to read the document is a mistake.
FAQs may also be processed by machines, but I regard that purely as a
secondary consideration. The human reader is first.
> Right.
>
> But if you read it, it is being recommended for exactly the sort of
> context we are talking about here.
Not in my FAQ. My FAQ is intended for human comprehension. I'm not going
to make what I regard as usage errors because someone may want to feed my
FAQ, intended to be read by people, into a program to be processed.
> What about punctuation? '.' is a legal URL character, and I have seen
> many URLs that contain '?' and other characters that are often used as
> punctuation.
I discussed that in the part of my email you must have skipped.
-- 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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