# jonadab:
# > That still leaves the problem of URLs that are longer
# > than 80 characters... I've never found a good solution
#
# that's the value of owning the domain in question,
Sure, but as you point out I don't own the whole web.
Go figure.
# There's also the new Make A Shorter Link service,
Interesting. I may have to check that out.
# Jonadab the Unsightly One schrieb:
# > Netscape 4.x does this consistently. But it will
# > eventually go away. (I think Netscape 2.x is almost
# > entirely gone from live usage now, except for people
# > who keep multiple browsers for testing...)
#
# and me. still the fastest startup-time of all
# browsers just to check a webpage.
I said almost. There are also a few people out
there still using secondhand 386s and such who
have not upgraded. But the percentage of those
is getting small enough that we can project that
the percentage of Netscape 4.x users will be
similarly shrunken in a similar number of years.
(As for speed, there's also lynx.)
# >That still leaves the problem of URLs that are longer
# >than 80 characters... I've never found a good solution
# >for that one.
#
# That's a good reason for putting the angle
# brackets around them. (Some, though not all,
# agents are smart enough to realize they ought
# to make the whole thing between brackets the
# content of the link.)
Aha. Knew there must be *some* reason for that
convention.
# > I [try to, think I do, &c] make sure it's always delimited by
# > whitespace, and since URLs cannot contain whitespace without
# > encoding it (%20 and similar nonsense)... there's never any
# > real ambiguity. This also allows the misguided auto-select
# > features...
#
# FWIW, problems with trailing delimiters are real. I have no idea
# if autoselection, or manual selection, or what, is at fault, but
# whenever I go snoop through the HTTP error logs here, I see
# *lots* of attempts to fetch URLs like
#
# http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html,
# http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html"
# http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
By whitespace, I mean space (decimal 32), horizontal.
tab, carriage return, or linefeed. Preferably space
or CRLF. Almost any agent that looks for URLs will
consider a space or CRLF to be a delimiter. They
don't all stop at punctuation, though, so if there's
punctuation I try to put some whitespace before it,
traditional typesetting rules notwithstanding.
Better is to avoid having punctuation directly
follow a URL (e.g., by putting it on its own line),
which has the advantage that you can dictate it in
the HTML version and have it happen magically when
you convert to plaintext for posting. This works
great as long as none of your URLs are longer than
about 79 chars. Sometimes when I really don't want
to do this, I omit a comma that technically should
be there, as in:
There is also a list of public news servers
at http://www.newzbot.com/ which ...
Technically "which" introduces inessential
information (as opposed to "that", which does
not) and so the relative clause should be set
off from the rest of the sentence by commas,
but I deliberately omitted the comma in the
interest of keeping the URL clean. Most
people will never miss that comma anyway.
I'm sure there are cases I've missed where
I accidentally included a URL in my FAQ that
might be interpreted uncleanly, but my
intention was to have them all followed
directly by whitespace to avoid the problem.
-- jonadab
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