On 4/3/11 5:24 AM, Keith Whaley wrote: > Question: > Thruout the following post, URL is repeatedly shown as 'URI' or some such. > The L in URL stands for Locator, and I'm wondering why all acronyms in here > show up as 'URI', even in the RFC quote. > > keith whaley > > David E. Ross wrote: > > On 4/2/11 5:24 AM, Ant wrote: > >> On 4/2/2011 2:08 AM PT, Jens Hatlak typed: > >> > >> What's the reasons for < and > ? They don't make sense to me. > >> What's wrong without them since most programs convert http to > >> links just fine? > > > The use of < and > to delimit URIs is per Appexdix C of RFC 3986. > > > > The delimiters serve human purposes, not software. As indicated in > > another reply in this thread, they provide for URIs that wrap from one > > line to another and yet remain understandable by human eyes. (I get > > E-mail messages with URIs that wrap to 3-4 lines.) > > > > To quote the RFC: > >> URIs are often transmitted through formats that do not provide a > >> clear context for their interpretation. For example, there are many > >> occasions when a URI is included in plain text; examples include text > >> sent in email, USENET news, and on printed paper. In such cases, it > >> is important to be able to delimit the URI from the rest of the text, > >> and in particular from punctuation marks that might be mistaken for > >> part of the URI. > > > > Also while blank spaces are not supposed to appear in a URI, I do see > > such URIs. Delimiters help humans to see that the first blank space > > does not end such URIs. > > >
See RFC 3986 at <ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3986.txt>. URIs are defined in Section 1. Subsection 1.1.3 distinguishes between URIs and URLs. The latter is a subset of the former. (I added the < > brackets manually to the URI pointing to the RFC.) -- David E. Ross <http://www.rossde.com/> On occasion, I might filter and ignore all newsgroup messages posted through GoogleGroups via Google's G2/1.0 user agent because of spam from that source. _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
