From: Craig A Summerhill (craig@cni.org)
Date: Tue Aug 03 1999 - 18:31:46 CDT
On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Daniel Stenberg <Daniel.Stenberg@sth.frontec.se> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Eric Stewart wrote:
> >
> > On an http: address that's linkified in a message, if it's at the
> > end of a sentence with a trailing '.', it puts that in the link.
>
> And how is hypermail supposed to know when the dot is actually included
> in the URL or not?
>
> One could argue if not the most common case is when the dot is not in the
> URL, but there still is no 100% working way to know.
You probably have no idea how many countless hours at the IETF I sat
through meetings with people griping about this very issue...
I'll admit to not having read the RFC(s) on URLs lately, possibly
never in the case of the one(s) actually approved by the IESG, but
there was, at one time, recommended practices within the first URL RFC
that a properly formatted URL included within a text documents should
be wrapped in angle brackets. And, of course, URLs pointing to
directories/indexed collections should always end with a trailing
forward slash. E.g.
Shortcuts, such as <www.cni.org> and <http://www.cni.org> are malformed
URLs, even if popular web browsers do support these strings as input
at the interface level.
Of course, try to get people to do this these rules when they are
keying in their email...
Nevertheless, I think it is fairly safe to assume any URL ending in
.html., .htm., .shtml., etc. can safely have the trailing period
stripped. I have never encountered one instance where this would
not be the case.
Personally, I'd favor a more aggressive approach in this case... I
think stripping the trailing period will be right 99 out of 100 times.
-- Craig A. Summerhill, Systems Coordinator and Program Officer Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 Internet: craig@cni.org AT&Tnet (202) 296-5098