On 7/16/2016 5:54 PM, »Q« wrote: > In <news:[email protected]>, > "David E. Ross" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 7/16/2016 12:35 PM, Paul B. Gallagher wrote [in part]: >> >> [snipped] >> >>> The chief purpose of the angle brackets is delineation -- to tell >>> the receiving application "the URL begins here... and ends here." >>> AFAIK they don't tell it "this is a URL." For that, you need either >>> an HTML message (which supports hyperlinks), or a receiving >>> application like SeaMonkey that recognizes URLs and email addresses >>> and makes them clickable. And yes, including "http://"; does help >>> some apps in their recognition process. Similarly, many diagnose >>> mail links whenever they see the character "@" -- this@that will >>> probably be clickable when SM receives this message. >> >> Actually, the use of the < and > as brackets is for humans. This is >> so a human user can tell how much to copy and then paste into a >> browser's address area. > > The angle brackets as delimiters for URLs in plain text were recommended > in the appendix of RFC 1738 because "it is convenient to have a > separate syntactic wrapper that delimits the URL and separates it from > the rest of the text" without specifying whether it's convenient only > for humans. Whether any software's algorithms make use of the > delimiters as they're determining whether there's a URL present, I > dunno. >
I prefer using RFC 3986, which updated RFC 1738. In any case, RFC 1738 is marked as obsolete. The overall context of Appendix C of RFC 3986 seems to indicate a human use for the brackets. This is seen in the reference to "on printed paper." in the first paragraph of the appendix. Yes, however, some software also makes use of the < and >. -- David E. Ross <http://www.rossde.com/>. Is it true that Donald Trump refuses to reveal his income tax returns because he uses so many questionable loopholes that he pays no taxes? See <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/15/new-evidence-donald-trump-didn-t-pay-taxes.html>. Even if those loopholes are legal, Trump might be too embarrassed to admit he pays no taxes. _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
