Other responses have shown that it's neither silly nor redundant, but I
think it's worth spending a small amount of bandwidth to explain why.
This is the HTML code that no one other than the author (or the curious)
will ever see:
<a href="http://some.url.com"><http://some.url.com></a>
(Actually, if the author uses a WYSIWYG HTML editor then even they will
never see this.)
In an HTML browser it will look like this:
There will be some indication that it's a selectable hyperlink (blue,
underlined, reversed highlight, etc.). This is redundant on the computer,
but important if the HTML document is printed.
(As has been pointed out, the URL RFC recommends putting "URL" after
the first bracket, but I have yet to encounter a URL parser which
requires this. The brackets, on the other hand, are very important and
are required for distinguishing the URL from any following puncuation.
They're also important for cases when the URL is split across more than
one line.)
In an ASCII version (typically produced by saving the HTML document as
text from a browser), it looks like this:
It's simple and straightforward, and makes the URL available to the
reader, no matter in what form they might be reading the FAQ. I use this
technique in my FAQ; and I think it works quite well. If you'd like to see it
in action, take a look at the HTML version at
<http://www.videodiscovery.com/vdyweb/dvd/dvdfaq.html> and the
ASCII version at
<ftp://ftp.videodiscovery.com/videodiscovery/dvd/dvdfaq.txt>
______________________________________________
Jim "The Frog" Taylor, Director of Information Technology
<mailto:jhtaylor@videodiscovery.com>
Videodiscovery, Inc. - Multimedia Education for Science and Math
Seattle, WA, 206-285-5400 <http://www.videodiscovery.com/vdyweb>
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