On 9/25/08 12:14 PM, "Folsom, Diana" <folsom at lacma.org> wrote:
> The "period following the URL" issue is addressed in 17.10 ("URLs and
> punctuation"), where they recommend including the period because: "Other
> punctuation marks used following a URL will be readily perceived as
> belonging to the surrounding text. It is therefore unnecessary to omit
> appropriate punctuation after the URL..."
>
> In other words, readers will understand that the period (or comma, or
> whatever) is part of the sentence, not part of the URL.
Human readers will, but will their email readers or other apps? I.e., what
about clickability when you're depending on some interpretation by an
unknown, unthinking software application? I don't think there's a lot of
standardization here, so I bet that a period can cause trouble.
I always end up writing my sentences so that I can include URLs on their own
lines without needing a period right there. For example, this URL:
http://www.metmuseum.org/
points to the Met's splash page and artwork of the day. Semi-informal, yes,
but it works for humans and machines. Putting URLs in parentheses seems to
work most of the time, too, but I don't know if it works all of the time.
How often do we end up cutting and pasting URLs into our web browsers, and
even recommend it to users of email we send out? I don't think most people
are very likely to do that very often.
Clearly this is not relevant when you are writing web pages and control the
HREF. In that case use a period (but you're probably not writing out URLs on
web pages anyway, rather you're linking from related text).
Matt
