[LINK] E-mail question

[Rick Welykochy]

Ivan Trundle wrote:

> Some time ago, there was discussion about the use of "<" and ">" to wrap 
> weblink references in e-mail messages.
> 
> Can anyone enlighten me as to the usefulness/appropriateness/standards 
> applicability of wrapping web references this way, and if it is still 
> considered to be a Good Thing?
> 
> I've not found any RFC relating to the use of less-than/greater-than 
> symbols which purportedly permit long URLs to remain 'clickable' even 
> after being wrapped at the 80-character-plus mark.

I find it very useful. When I see <http ... in plain text, I look for
the closing > character. Thus at a glance I know if the URL has been
damaged in transit. And often it does get mangled and wrecked by email
gateways / servers / clients.

Reread the above: often it DOES GET MANGLED. Incredible when you think
about it. We can transmit a 4 GB movie over the Net in minutes
sans error, but email cannot transmit a 200-character URL correctly.

Of course, if you provided the URL in plaintext as an attachment to
an email it would be transmitted just fine.

The RFC on URLs does indeed mention anglebracket quoting:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html

   The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe [in URLs] because they are
   used as the delimiters around URLs in free text

In practice, I have received weird looks and strange questions from
the uninitiated when I do enclose a URL in anglebrackets.


cheers
rickw




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